CARVEN FROM THE 
LAUREL TREE 

THEODORE MAYNARD 











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CARVEN FROM 
THE LAUREL TREE 

ESSAYS 
By Theodore Maynard 



NEW YORK 

ROBERT M. McBRIDE & CO. 
1919 



N 



To 
CECIL CHESTERTON 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

The Mystical Note in Poetry ... ... ... i 

Mysticism and the Oxford Poetry Book ... 13 

The Humour of the Saints ... ... ... 19 

Sanctity and the Sanitary Inspector ... ... 25 

On Drinking Songs ... ... ... ... 29 

The Art of Alice Meynell ... ... ... 37 

The Drama of the Dramatists ... ... 45 

The Revival of English Poetry ... ... 51 

Poets' Prose ... ... ... ... ... 59 

The Guild Idea ... ... ... ... ... 65 

' Roman and Utopian More ' ... ... ... 85 

This Green Plot shall be our Stage 97 

A Secret England .,. ,,, ,,. ... 103 



These essays have been published in the following papers, to 
the editors of which I tender my thanks for their courteous per- 
mission in allowing them to be reprinted : — The New Witness, 
To-Day, The Poetry Review, The Catholic World, and America. 

The essay entitled ' The Revival of Poetry ' was written ori. 
ginall}- as two articles, the first appearing, under its present title, 
simultaneously in the Poetry Review and America, the second in 
the Magnificat as ' The Heaven of the Poets.' 

I must also thank Mr. W. B. Yeats, Mr. Hilaire Belloc, Mr. 
G. K. Chesterton, Mrs. Meynell and Mr. Ralph Hodgson for their 
courtesy, Mrs. Joseph Plunkett for a poem of Joseph Plunkett, 
Mr. Sturge Moore for allowing me to quote from * Michael Field,' 
Messrs. Sidgwick and Jackson and the poet's executor for two 
passages from Rupert Brooke, and Mr. Meynell for his generosity 
in the matter of Francis Thompson. 



THE MYSTICAL NOTE IN 
POETRY 

IT is now a fashion with those well-fed, woolly, 
slightly artistic people, who twenty years or so 
ago, paraded their temperament and intensity, to pride 
themselves upon being mystics. Any Americanised 
Oriental who likes to advertise, any spiritualist or 
theosophist who takes the trouble to set up shop, is 
reasonably certain to have a considerable clientHe, 
who seek to escape from a gross world through 
they care not what wild avenues. But beyond these 
rather vulgar folk there are quite a number of nice 
poetic souls, stirred vaguely but powerfully, who 
seek a literary solace in the dreamy loveliness of the 
school of W. B. Yeats, ' 7E.,' and their kind, or— 
if they are ordered in mind — in a more or less philo- 
sophical form of symbolism, which they admiringly, 
but incorrectly, describe as 'mysticism.' Their 
springs are unquestionably stirred, though they wot 
not of the angel. 

O sweet everlasting voices, be still ; 
Go to the guards of the heavenly fold 
And bid them wander, obeying your will. 
Flame under flame, till Time be no more ; 



2 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

Have you not found that our hearts are old, 
That you call in birds, in wind on the hill, 
In shaken boughs, in tide on the shore? 
O sweet everlasting voices, be still. 

R. L. Nettleship, a lucid spokesman for the more 
philosophically-minded, gives this definition of the 
subject in his ' Remains ' : ' The true mysticism is 
the belief that everything, in being what it is, is 
symbolic of something more/ Now that is a very- 
good description of decent symbolism, but it has 
nothing to do with mysticism proper. For while 
symbolism is of the utmost value as an expression 
of mysticism, it is only the expression of the thing, 
not the thing itself. That is an experience remain- 
ing inviolably secret and personal. To the soul 
having the lonely consciousness of God. 

Nee lingua valet dicere, 
Nee littera exprimere : 
Expertus potest eredere 
Quid sit Jesum diligere. 

Francis Thompson, writing in his ' Ode to the 
Setting Sun,' 

Even so, O cross ! thine is the victory : 

Thy roots are fast within our fairest fields ; 

Brightness may emanate in Heaven from thee, 
Here thy dread symbol only shadow yields ! 

is speaking the language of the heart (or mysticism) 
in words which might have been uttered by St. John 
of the Cross, where the other modern poet (whose 



The Mystical Note in Poetry 3 

name I have unhappily forgotten^) expresses only 
the language of the eyes — or symbolism : 

I see His blood upon the rose, 

And in the stars the glory of His eyes ; 

His body gleams amid eternal snows ; 
His tears fall from the skies. 

I see His face in every flower ; 

The thunder and the singing of the birds 
Are but His voice ; and carven by His power 

Rocks are His written words. 

All pathways by His feet are worn ; 

His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea ; 
His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn ; 

His cross is every tree. 

Fine though that is, the poet has not won to the 
secret place which the mystic knows, where God, 
without form of words or speech, declares all Truth. 

What, then, is true mysticism ? That is perhaps 
the most difficult of all questions to answer, and if, 
in my attempt, I write with a Catholic bias, I do so 
not in a spirit of propaganda, but simply because it 
is the only way by which I know how to approach 
the subject. 

Although the saints and mystics are the last fine 
flowers which blossom upon the Living Vine, and 
are the especial glory of the Catholic Church which 
has produced them, there never has been any formal 

* T read this poem in a review of a book published six years 
ago, and while remembering the verses forgot the name of the 
poet, which meant nothing to me at the time, I have discovered, 
since writing this essay, that the forgotten name is that of Joseph 
Plunkett, who was executed in the Dublin Rebellion of 1916. 



4 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

and official definition of either sanctity or mysticism. 
Yet, since the Church has crowned certain of her 
children for the virtue and the charity which they so 
splendidly achieved, such as have been distinctly ap- 
proved by her may be accepted as showing to the 
world, by their lives, what it is that the Church un- 
derstands by sanctity and mysticism. Concerning 
these there is nothing which can properly be calkd 
a history — their biographies and aureoles are all that 
have been left us. Each mystic is a separate star, 
although the sun around which they revolve is the 
same. No class in society has been quite without 
them. Popes, kings, queens and cardinals ride in 
that brave company, with merchants, soldiers, pea- 
sants, cooks, fishermen and labourers! Nor must 
we forget one public headsman, or 

St. Zita, the good kitchen maid, — 
She prayed and she prayed and she prayed and 
she prayed. 

Each one of these souls, differing from the rest in 
station, culture, temperament and experience, has 
its own secret canticle to sing. No cast-iron defini- 
tion can include them all, but one may say that 
mysticism, as practised in common by the Blessed, 
was their experimental knowledge of God gained 
through love of Him. 

We are fortunate in having two supreme descrip- 
tive mystical poems in our language — Thompson's 
* Hound of Heaven ' and Crashaw's ' Hymn to St. 
Teresa.' The modern poet tells with true mystical 
particularity of the remorseless wooing by God of 



The Mystical Note in Poetry 5 

the human soul, where Crashaw is concerned rather 
to sing of that extraordinary woman who reached 
such mystical heights as turn even the onlooker 
dizzy : 

O thou undaunted daughter of desires ! 

By all thy dower of lights and fires ; 

By all the eagle in thee, all the dove ; 

By all thy lives and deaths of love ; 

By thy large draughts of intellectual day, 

And by thy thirsts of love more large than they ; 

By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire ; 

By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire ; 

By the full kingdom of that final kiss 

That seized thy parting soul and sealed thee His ; 

By all the heavens thou hast in Him 

(Fair sister of the seraphim !) 

By all of Him we have in thee ; 

Leave nothing of myself in me, 

Let me so read thy life that I 

Unto all life of mine may die. 

There are opponents of mysticism, men who, in 
spite of their sympathy with so much of the sweet 
graciousness of the saints, are yet prevented by a 
too pedantic love of philosophical definition from a 
proper appreciation of the Christian mystics. Some 
of them, indeed, would go sO' far as to deny alto- 
gether the existence of mysticism in the Church, be- 
cause, for them, the thing begins and ends with 
Plotinus and the Alexandrian gnostics, and, accord- 
ingly, means the repudiation of humanity and nature 
and the atrophy of mind and will. It is the mys- 
ticism of Emerson's * Brahma.' 



6 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

If the red slayer think he slays, 

Or if the slain think he is slain, 
They know not well the subtle ways 

I keep and pass and turn again. 

Far or forgot to me is near, 

Shadow and sunlight are the same ; 

The vanished gods to me appear, 

And one to me are shame and fame. 

They reckon ill who leave me out. 

When me they fly, I am the wings, 

I am the doubter and the doubt. 

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings. 

The strong gods pine for my abode, 
And pine in vain the Sacred Seven ; 

But thou meek lover of the good 

Find me and turn thy back on Heaven. 

It must be conceded, and conceded joyfully, that 
these anti-mystics are right enough in their dislikes 
— for the type of mysticism which they condemn has 
been condemned repeatedly by the Church. Their 
overwhelming wrongness is their failure to recog- 
nise the existence of mysticism of another and a 
healthier school. 

Now the normality of sanctity is a thing especially 
insisted on by the Church; that there is no rpan in 
the world who cannot become a saint if he but will, 
since the saint is not unique in kind (as a great 
musician, for instance, is unique), but only in degree. 
He is merely one who, exercising ordinary faculties 
and practising the virtues within the reach of any 
man, has succeeded to the point of heroism. He 



The Mystical Note in Poetry 7 

treads the path of simple and humble duties; and 
though his soul may be snatched up to the seventh 
heaven and the vision of things unlawful for man to 
utter, his feet are firmly rooted in quiet soil. 

Hence the saints' exquisite poise. They are not 
less human for having plumbed the deep sea of God, 
but have gained thereby a certainty and lightness of 
touch. St. Francis becomes the troubadour of the 
Queen of Heaven; St. Bernard, for all his sternness, 
is so pitiful for animals that no small bird flying from 
a hawk lacked a sign of the Cross from him to aid 
its escape; St. Catharine of Siena, mortified to ex- 
tremity, smiles out of her pain as the lover of 
flowers and the fondler of Httle children; St. Teresa, 
though keeping her stateHness and fine manners to 
the end, plays her little flute and tambourine on 
feast days in her convent, where they may still be 
seen. Laughter is ever on their lips and fun in their 
hearts — even when it is not expressed in so racy and 
whimsical a fashion as it was by St. Philip Neri. 

Far from the mystics wasting themselves in idle 
and vague dreams, they surely were among the 
most painfully lucid of mortals ! Although St. 
John of the Cross sets out to write on perhaps the 
most abstruse and specialistic subject in the world, 
he succeeds in being more clear and scientific upon 
it than most philosophers could be upon sausages — 
did philosophers ever deal with so noble a theme! 
St. Teresa, for all her 

Little eagles and young loves, whose high 
Flights scorn the lazy dust and things that die, 



8 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

was perhaps the most successful business woman of 
her day. More amazing still, St. Catharine was, 
even during her ecstasies, an exact and untiring 
worker, and while in the mystic state actually dic- 
tated letters, often of the highest political impor- 
tance ! As her secretaries have thoughtfully in- 
dicated those written in rapture, we are able to re- 
mark the saint's force and good sense while in the 
mystic state. Neither her heart nor her head nor 
her nerves were the worse for the love of God. 

One of the most hopeful signs of our day is a very 
real modern revival of interest in mysticism. When 
this appears in verse — as it does in the work of so 
many contemporary poets — it is always the earnest 
of a renewed literary vigour and originality. Dis- 
counting all the crude and vulgar manifestations of 
it in the numerous pseudo-Oriental cults, the fact re- 
mains that men and women are turning back to 
long-forgotten fountains to draw of the sweet and 
bitter waters of the old Catholic writers. Even out- 
side the Church is the impulse felt, and the studies 
of Miss Evelyn Underbill and Dean Inge — partial 
though they are in the one case, and with a tinge of 
unpleasantness in the other — have done much to 
stimulate a more general interest in the things of 
the soul. Even if the waters generally trickle thinly, 
they are constant. Ralph Hodgson's lyric, ^The 
Mystery,' exquisitely illustrates the new spirit in our 
poets. 

He came and took me by the hand 
Up to a red rose tree, 



The Mystical Note in Poetry 9 

He kept His meaning to Himself 
But gave a rose to me. 

I did not pray Him to lay bare 

The mystery to me, 
Enough the rose was Heaven to smell 

And His own face to see. 

The mystical note is to be found in such dissimi- 
lar writings as those of Mr. Masefield and of Mrs. 
Meynell; and the divine theme is in their music, 
though thumped by the one on a Salvation Army 
tambourine, and given life by the other on the most 
deHcate of violins, where love and science are as 
happily mated as in the Adoro Te of St. Thomas 
Aquinas. 

'You never attained to Him.' 'If to attain 

Be to abide, then that may be.' 
* Endless the way, followed with how much pain ! ' 
' The way was He. ' 

The potent and purifying influence of Blake, he 
who, as a child, saw God looking in through the 
window anti never in manhood forgot the sight, 
hardly makes for mysticism according to our defini- 
tion — broad as it is. The man was rather a prophet 
or visionary than a mystic proper, and with him may 
be grouped Browning, sometimes, and G. K. Ches- 
terton, almost always : 

The fields from Islington to Marylebone, 

To Primrose Hill and Saint John's Wood, 

Were builded over with pillars of gold ; 
And there Jerusalem's pillars stood. 



lo Carven from the Laurel Tree 

Her little ones ran on the fields, 

The Lamb of God among- them seen ; 

And fair Jerusalem, His Bride, 

Among- the little meadows g-reen. 

Pancras and Kentish Town repose 

Among her golden pillars high, 
Among her golden arches which 

Shine upon the starry sky. 

The Jew's Harp House and the Green Man, 
The ponds where boys to bathe delight, 

The fields of cows by Welling' s Farm 
Shine in Jerusalem's pleasant sight. 

She walks upon our meadows green. 
The Lamb of God w^alks by her side. 

And every English child is seen 

Children of Jesus and His Bride. 

It is Jacob rather than David whose voice is heard 
there — the first Isaiah, to be higher-critical for a 
moment, rather than the second; and though Fran- 
cis Thompson had far more of David in him than 
had Blake (by the way, one can imagine Blake 
dauntlessly wrestling with God until dawn and the 
withering* of his thigh), yet in his ' In No Strange 
Land ' the seer is heard above the saint. 

Not where the wheeling systems darken, 
And our benumbed conceiving soars ! — 
The drift of pinions, would we hearken, 
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors. 

The angels keep their ancient places ; — 
Turn but a stone, and start a wing ! 
'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces. 
That miss the many-splendoured thing. 



The Mystical Note in Poetry ii 

But (when so sad tbou canst not sadder) 
Cry ; — and upon thy so sore loss 
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder 
Pitched between Heaven and Charing- Cross. 

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter, 
Cry, — cling-ing- Heaven by the hems ; 
And lo, Christ walking on the water 
Not of Genesareth, but Thames ! 

The sense of divine domesticity has come back to 
us, and the text is always ' It is not too hard for 
thee, neither is it far off ' ; for in the words Mr. 
Chesterton puts into the mouth of our Lady in his 
'Ballad of the White Horse': 

' The gates of Heaven are lightly locked, 

We do not guard our gain, 
The heaviest hind may easily 
Come silently and suddenly 

Upon me in a lane. 

* And any little maid that walks 

In good thoughts apart, 
May break the guard of the three kings 
And see the dear and dreadful things 

I hid within my heart.' 

When * Heaven becomes a homely town,' the dul- 
lest suburb will take on a bright significance : and 
though some people will probably be shocked (for 
mystics commonly do seem blasphemous to the ir- 
religious) the saints would have seen nothing dread- 
ful in the thought of such a familiarity with God as 



12 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

could prompt the Rev. R. L. Gales to conclude a 
baby's grace with 

Praise for tea and buttered toast — 
Father, Son and Holy Ghost. 

The thought of this kind closeness of our God is 
at the centre of all mystical contemplation ; for mys- 
tery is the exact opposite of mystification. 



MYSTICISM AND THE OXFORD 
POETRY BOOK 

THERE has always been an intimate connection 
between mysticism and poetry. Just as the 
human lover chooses the most beautiful and perfect 
words to give fitting praise to his lady, so the saint 
finds that song is the natural language for telHng 
forth the love of God. The Bridegroom demands 
music as well as the bride, and the saint's ardour 
and tenderness kindle to a passionate flame. It is 
remarkable how many of the mystics have become 
poets. St. Bernard, St. Francis, St. John of the 
Cross, Blessed Henry Suso, and Richard Rolle of 
Hampole each 

Teach how the crucifix may be 
Carven from the laurel tree ; 

and St. Thomas Aquinas turns from the Summa, 
which only make him the doctor of the Church, to 
write his matchless hymns which prove him the 
lover of Christ. 

Even when the mystics are not poets by achieve- 
ment themselves, they are themes for poets. 
Romance seems to transfigure their sackcloth. One 
only has to remember St. Elizabeth of Hungary, 



14 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

St. Brendan, St. Rose of Lima — whose very name 
rings like a lyric — St. Peter Celestine (the Hermit- 
Pope whom Dante, because of his burning honour 
for the Papacy, consigned to bell), Blessed Joan of 
Arc, and many more, to feel that these lived poetry 
even when they did not make it. The roses of 
legend cluster round their heads as the daisies grew 
at their feet. 

But in our day, when mysticism is so fashionable 
and unfortunately means so many things, it is of 
the utmost importance, if we wish to preserve its 
significance and value, to detect the imitations, 
those moods of vague wistfulness or enchantment, 
which constantly claimi its name. Hence a mere 
emotional exaltation before the outspread loveliness 
of the world, or an intellectual idealisation of beauty, 
do not in any sense constitute mysticism, although 
they are often thought so to do. ' The Heavens de- 
clare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth 
His handiwork ' — but ' there is no speech nor lan- 
guage; their voice cannot be heard.' To the mystic, 
to him who has torn aside the veil and heard the 
voice of God in his soul, the whole earth is full of 
His bright and jewelled beauty, and the mountains 
and the hills break forth into singing. Such a 
vision is delicately etched by Father Tabb in ' Christ 
and the Pagan * : 

I had no God but these, 
The sacerdotal Trees, 
And they uplifted me. 
^ I hung upon a Tree.' 



Mysticism and the Oxford Poetry Book 15 

The sun and moon I saw, 
And reverential awe 
Subdued me day and night. 
' I am the perfect Light.* 

But this penetrating insight is not mysticism itself, 
but only one of the results of mysticism. Even 
when Crashaw exclaimed : 

Love, thou art absolute sole Lord 
Of Life and Death ! 

he was only recording another, though a deeper, 
effect of the personal and experimental knowledge 
of God which is the heart of mysticism. But be- 
cause I may be accused of being too ecclesiastical 
and specialistic in my treatment of this subject, I am 
willing, since God is the sustaining reality of the 
universe, to broaden my definition by saying that 
mysticism begins with the fierce, unconquerable pas- 
sion of the soul to pierce to Reality and is consum- 
mated in the union of the soul with Reality. " Too 
late have I known Thee, O ancient Truth ! ' prays 
St. Augustine. ' Too late have I loved Thee, O 
Beauty ever ancient and ever new ! And behold 
Thou wast within, and I was abroad, and there I 
sought Thee, and, deformed as I was, ran after 
those beauties which Thou hast made.' Like him 
all the mystics lay aside the accidents of the thing 
in order to find its essential substance. For them 
roses fade and wither until they have found the 
Mystic Rose. They ponder over secrets. They 
pluck the ' Flower in the crannied wall ' and cry : 
Little flower — but if I could understand 



1 6 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is ! 

Like Browning (greater as a mystic than Blake, 
even as he was greater as a poet), they know that 

There is an inmost centre in us all. 
Where truth abides in fulness. 

This hunger for Reality is the final test of genuine 
mysticism. It seeks to break the ' barrier to eter- 
nity,' to ravish the unseen, to make its perilous es- 
calade to God. Mrs. Meynell, writing ' To a 
Daisy ' : 

Thou little veil for so great mystery, 

When shall I penetrate all things and thee? 

speaks for all the true mystics. These do not seek 
to weave a cloud of golden glamour round the soul, 
but to burst through the cloud to the Reality be- 
yond. 

Now in Christian mysticism the Ineffable des- 
cends to us and lays Itself within our hands. The 
Immortal puts on mortality, that the mortal may be 
clothed upon with immortality. God is born as a 
child. The sacraments make us all partakers of the 
divine nature. There is here no place for an eso- 
teric doctrine, but man is given the strange road of 
humility. 

By each new obeisance in spirit I climb to His feet. 

When, therefore, we come upon * The Oxford 
Book of English Mystical Verse,'* and find that its 

* The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse; chosen by D. H, 
S, Nicholson and A. H. E. Lee. The Clarendon Press. 



Mysticism and the Oxford Poetry Book 17 

editors can discover nothing better to say of mys- 
ticism than that it is ' intimations of a consciousness 
wider and deeper than the normal,' we know that 
they have not the root of the matter. That is not 
the language of the mystic, but the jargon of the 
practical politician ! The mystic when he speaks at 
all of his experience aims at an absolute lucidity. 
He may stammer through the burden of overwhelm- 
ing glory, his speech may fail him and snap like 
glass. But going through such a book one feels 
that, however great its fascination may be (and the 
fascination in this case is very great indeed), a fun- 
damental failure to distinguish between symbolism, 
metaphysics and mysticism steals away half the 
value it might have possessed. A task of absorbing 
interest to me would be to analyse a number of the 
poems in turn and to assign them to their proper 
categories, but, fortunately for my readers, space 
prohibits such gigantic toils. Merely as an illustra- 
tion, however, I take Shelley's 'Adonais.' Ignor- 
ing the personal facts about Shelley, and the incon- 
gruity of claiming as a mystic one who used osten- 
tatiously to inscribe himself an atheist, I choose 
one stanza for a simple textual dissection. Reading 

The One remains, the many change and pass ; 
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly ; 
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, 
Stains the white radiance of Eternity, 
Until death tramples it to fragments, 

we feel that here are lines that might have been 
written by St. Teresa. The next line might have 



1 8 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

some mystical point if uttered by St. John of the 
Cross : 

Die— 

If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek ! 

We remember, however, that not * death to the 
world ' is sung here, as in the poems of the great 
Carmelite, but a pagan pyre, and pass on : 

Follow where all is fled ! — Rome's azure sky, 
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words are weak 
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to 
speak. 

, . . Then the mystic closes the book in chill dis- 
appointment. But if, being also a poet, he should 
persevere to the end he will wonder why that 
egoistic sceptic, Lascelles Abercrombie, is allowed 
to be so priggish in its pages, or why an originality- 
monger may rehash ' Abt Vogler,' with 

Nothing is lost : all that is dreamed or done 
Passes unaltered the eternal way, 

when Lionel Johnson and R. L. Gales are excluded 
from this singing cloister. There are many other 
causes for wonder in this Oxford Book, but those I 
have pointed out will be sufficient, I imagine, to 
stun most people. 



THE HUMOUR OF THE SAINTS 

TO speak of the Saints as possessing humour will 
seem to many peopk a forced piece of special 
pleading. Burglars may be, in their leisure, admir- 
able husbands; and professional politicians, good 
fellows, but their calling usually precludes them 
from honesty or a pedantic regard for veracity. In 
much the same way, while the Saints are easily ima- 
gined as humble, or ardent, or mortified, or com- 
passionate, they are not readily credited with gaiety. 
Sounding brass they may sometimes be, but rarely 
tinkling cymbals; holy but not hilarious. Anything 
else but that. Granted 

The courtesy of saints 
Their gentleness and scorn, 

steadfastness, charity and a burning courage; yet 
laughter and sanctity do not easily mix. This idea 
springs from a profound misunderstanding of the 
nature of hoHness of heart, from a feeling that 
saints are divorced from humanity and carry their 
lives along alien ways. Their wan, unearthly 
beauty glows only upon a cathedral window and is 
lost if brought out into the daylight and the loud 
streets of the world. Kipling put it forcibly when 
he boasted that single men in barracks are rarely 



20 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

plaster saints. The saints who grew before the 
Lord inside or outside barracks were made of any- 
thing but plaster. 

Their infinite variety is astounding; kings and 
popes appearing at one end of the scale and arti- 
sans and servant girls at the other; St. Benedict 
Labre, who cultivated dirt, standing against St. 
Theresa, who changed her linen twice a day. But 
of all it may be said that gaiety was their staff. 
They went laughing to heaven, for, even more than 
courage, cheerfulness is the abiding mark of the 
cloistered soul. 

In some cases, of which St. Aloysius is a type, 
we see only dark eyes alive with mystery. But 
though we do not catch the personal humour of 
such across the centuries, we may imagine that they 
were the cause of harmless merriment in others. 
The elaborate chilblain plaster of the Jesuit cadet 
surely was a well of mirth to his companions. And 
if the nurse of the precocious saint, whose name 
escapes me, was edified by his refusal to take mam- 
mary nourishment on Fridays, we may guess that 
she, or at least the child's father, was vastly 
amused. The monumental incompetence, however, 
of St. Joseph of Cupertino must have been enjoyed 
by the saint himself, or why did he name himself 
' Brother Ass ' ? And Brother Juniper saw the 
point of his fantastic and engaging awkwardness. 
He it was who roared loudest over the affair of the 
pig's trotters. 

Beyond the happy Innocence which is the secret 



The Humour of the Saints 21 

of the child, there is the irony which is the secret 
of the universe, and to both of these every saint 
comes at last. St. Theresa was a conscious wit, 
sprinkling her letters and her conversation with 
pungent mots. During the intervals of administer- 
ing impartial justice, writing the Utopia, confuting 
Tyndall, saying his prayers and being beheaded, 
Blessed Thomas More conducted a jocular corres- 
pondence with Erasmus and composed Latin epi- 
grams. Here is a translation of one made by 
Thomas Pike and published in 1569: — 

None could persuade him Radishes to eat, 

Vertue abhors such kinde of luscious Meat. 

Casting about his dull unpleasant eye, 

He chanc'd fine tender Onions to espie : 

He snaps up those. Though Radishes a'nt good, 

It seems that Onions are a vertuous food. 

St. Thomas Aquinas, when he wasn't writing his 
'Summa,' made excellent limericks and even St. 
Bernard, that great enigma, a man so rapt in con- 
templation that at the end of his novitiate he was 
unable to say whether his dormitory ceiling was flat 
or arched; who in so many fields was the first man 
of his age, as scholar, preacher, poet and man of 
affairs; of whom Ernest Hello has aptly said that 
' it is impossible to write the history of his life with- 
out writing that of the whole world during his life- 
time ' — even that prince of monks and of saints 
loved his little joke. 'Ah, Father Abbot,' said his 
muleteer by the lakes of vSwitzerland, ' why do you 
not admire the scenery?' * My son, I was saying 



22 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

my prayers.' ' But I can admire the lakes and the 
hills and say my prayers too/ 'Come/ was the re- 
sponse, ' I will make you an offer. If you can say 
one Pater Noster without distraction you shall have 
my mule.' Down went the man upon his knees: 
' Pater noster qui es in coelis, sanctificetur — and the 
saddle, too, Father Abbot ? ' ' No, my son, no- 
thing! ' 

It is easy to hear the ringing laugh of St. Francis, 
for in evei*y company he was the merriest man pre- 
sent. There was perhaps something more than 
good poetry in his personifications of * Brother 
Sun ' and * Sister Moon ' ; and he may have been 
as glad in his discovery as was a modern friar I 
knew, who shook with joy at his jest in speaking of 
'Brother Bacon' and 'Sister Sausage.' The early 
Franciscans were constantly doing and saying un- 
accountable things, but when St. Anthony preached 
to the fishes and Blessed Giles dispelled an unbe- 
liever's doubts on the doctrine of free will, by play- 
ing a fiddle and dancing round the room, the whole 
cosmos stood still to watch the comedy. 

In different vein was the advice of St. Louis to 
De Joinville, but very good advice nevertheless. 
' No man except he be a very learned clerk should 
dispute with a Jew or a heretic; but let him smite 
with his sword and pierce to the midriff as far as 
the blade will enter.' 

One of the richest of the saints in the matter of 
humour was St. Philip Neri. He who could never 
finish the words : Cupio dissolvi et esse cunt Christo 



The Humour of the Saints 23 

without being snatched away into rapture; he who 
towards the end of his Hfe said Mass in private so 
that he might dismiss his server for a couple of 
hours after the Agnus Dei while he made his Com- 
munion, was racy and whimsical to a degree. Did 
one of the Fathers of the Oratory appear to be in 
danger of growing puffed up by his eloquence? 
Then let him walk round the refectory bearing a 
monkey with a little gun upon his shoulder! Or 
he must carry Philip's favourite cat on a cushion 
behind its master through the streets of Rome ! 
Lest anyone should think the fun of the best- 
beloved saint that ever lived was always at the ex- 
pense of other people, we should remember his pic- 
nics for the Dominican novices when he urged the 
young friars to ' eat and grow fat/ 

An almost roguish humour was the natural breath 
of the Middle Ages and of their saints. It peeped 
out from the . carving of a choir-stall or a capital, 
from an illuminated letter or a tail piece in a Missal. 
The spirit that inspired the lovely Cornish carol 

When on the Cross hanged was I, 

When a spear to my heart did glance, 

There issued forth both water and blood 
To call my true love to the dance — 

was also in the ' Mirror for Monks ' where Blosius 
wrote ' Jesus makes a pleasant sauce for a poor and 
unsavoury dish.' It shone in the jewelled gaiety of 
Fra Angelico's ' Dance of the Angels ' ; it lives and 
moves still where the boys dance at Corpus Christi 
before the high altar in Seville. 



24 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

Nor is this remarkable when we apprehend the 
abysmal depths of laughter in the Faith. The 
thought of the weak things of the earth confound- 
ing the mighty is as fundamentally comic, and comic 
for the same reason, as the sight of a bishop slip- 
ping on a piece of orange peel. And the strange 
humility of our religion receives its fulfUment in 
the Incarnation. For in the words of Mr. Chester- 
ton's Christmas poem,: — 

Laughter like a lion wakes 

To roar to the resounding plain, 

And the whole heaven shouts and shakes 
For God himself is born again — 

And we are little children walking 
Through the snow and rain. 

What saint would not be merry in a world which 
God created out of nothing and where He founded 
His Church with a pun? 



SANCTITY AND THE SANI- 
TARY INSPECTOR 

IN the ages of Faith the average man, though 
probably he was not then unablutioned to any- 
greater degree than he is to-day, felt in some dim 
fashion that a carelessness with regard to personal 
cleanliness did in certain instances constitute a 
prima facie case for sanctity. Like bodily asceti- 
cism, it did not by itself alone offer an absolute 
proof of holiness of heart, but it was popularly 
taken as presumptive evidence. To-day, neither 
fasting nor filth has the smallest honour paid to it. 
But the mediaeval man had a different standard of 
values. When St. Thomas of Canterbury was mur- 
dered and the monks found that beneath his costly 
robe his hair shirt was full of Hce, a great cry rang 
through the Cathedral, ' A saint ! A saint ! ' To 
this day at least one saint has a lesson in tlie Bre- 
viary which solemnly recounts among his other 
virtues the fact that for a period of some years he 
took no bath. Against this, one must admit, may 
be set St. Bernard's dictum, ' Poverty I love, but 
not dirt.' But it must be remembered, firstly, that 
St. Bernard was an aristocrat with an aristocrat's 
prejudices, and, secondly, that as an abbot he knew 
that the cloister must be maintained in strict order 
and decorum to exist at all. The idea must have 



26 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

been prevalent in his age for him to have attacked 
it. 

The current opinion, however, is summed up in 
the detestable proverb ' Cleanliness is next to God- 
liness.' Its advocates wear the white shirt-front of 
a blameless Hfe. They will show you their faith by 
their works; and their chief — sometimes their only 
work — is washing well behind the ears ! 

It may be true that the majority of the disrepu- 
table people are not too clean; that the man who 
appears in the police court for larceny, or drunken- 
ness, or wife-beating is generally unshaven and be- 
grimed; but it is true that nearly all the essentially 
wicked people in the world are immaculate in their 
personal appearance, ' perfumed with myrrh, aloes 
and cinnamon.' Those, on the other hand, who are 
held up to us as exemplars by our religion — child- 
ren and the poor — are almost universally dirty, and 
their happy indifference to mere physical cleanliness 
was the source of the admiration once given to a 
saint such as Benedict Labre. Innocence went to 
the making of mudpies. Charity was in the chapel 
cleaner of ' My New Curate ' who saw no harm in 
a ' little blessed dust ' upon the altar, and good 
sense in the first old wife who held that every 
human being must eat a peck of dirt before he 
dies ! It may have been felt, too, that there was 
here also something of the ascetic antagonism to 
material comfort such as prompts the dying Trap- 
pist to breathe his last upon a cross of ashes. It 
may be only a fanciful notion, but I think I can 



Sanctity and the Sanitary Inspector 27 

detect a satirical symbolism in the division of the 
sheep from the goats — sheep are much dirtier than 
goats. 

Cleanliness may be good as a social custom, 
though the decay of Rome may be cited against the 
habit of taking too many baths; but there is not 
the slightest or most whimsical connection between 
being clean of hands and clean of heart. There is 
no reason, I grant, why these things should not 
go together; only we know from experience that 
they rarely do. 

Moreover, this cult is quite modern, coming to 
us by our contact with the heathen East. I have 
heard it said that when it was first proposed to 
build bathrooms at Oxford the authorities opposed 
the suggestion on the ground that the terms only 
lasted eight weeks ! 

Perhaps it ought to be explained that I take 
baths, not indeed with superstition, but with reason- 
able regularity. It is true that I shrink from the 
icy water of winter ; but. well, not even my de- 
pravity is heroic. While by instinct and upbring- 
ing I am on the side of an almost fastidious cleanli- 
ness, my reason and such remnants of humility as 
are left me rise in violent protest against sanitation 
gone insane. Our experts declare that it is un- 
healthy for a mother to kiss her child on the lips, 
and some Protestant bodies have begun to use in- 
dividual Communion cups from which the wine sym- 
bolising for them the blood of God may be drunk 
without fear of a fellow Communicant's germs ! If 



28 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

this were all, however, we could afford to make 
merry over such stupid solemnity; but a scientific 
tyranny is stalking gigantic through the earth. The 
sanitary inspectors are forcibly opening the win- 
dows of the unhygenic poor, and middle-class busy- 
bodies are bringing to them soap, and their soapy 
pride and the vile cleanliness of eugenics. The Pro- 
testant proverb has been elevated into a religion 
with a set of new syllogistic dogmas. Cleanliness 
is next to Godliness. Cleanliness is a sign of Godli- 
ness. Cleanliness is Godliness. The social superiors 
of the poor speak of them with a deadly sneer as 
' the great unwashed ! ' 

I have called this religion new; but I am wrong — 
for it dates from the time of the Pharisees. They too 
made clean the outside of the platter and left the in- 
ward part full of extortion and wickedness; they 
condemned the Disciples because they ate with un- 
washen hands. Against thefn was the Divine anger 
kindled and the awful 'woes!' hurled. They made 
the point of the parable, where Dives sat in purple 
and fine linen, while Lazarus lay at his gate filthy 
and in sores. The Pharisees have come back to us 
tithing mint and anise and cummin in their hygenic, 
draught-proof synagogues, leaving undone the 
weightier matters of the law, judgment and mercy 
and faith. A protest must be made against their 
smug science. Perhaps it will come, as such pro- 
tests usually do, in the person of some fierce and 
spotless St. Simon Stylites, raised high upon a pillar 
of filth as a sign before the world. 



ON DRINKING SONGS 

Nunc est bibendum (Hor. Lib. I., Car. XXXVII.) 

WITH the advent of the social reformer the very- 
word ' beer ' seems to have taken on a sinister 
sound, and is as much tabooed in polite society as 
the word 'trousers' was once said to have been. 
This harmless and refreshing drink has become 
credited with the most deviHsh properties and char- 
acteristics, so that when it has to be discussed (and 
heaven only knows how much the thought of it dis- 
turbs the minds of meddlesome philanthropists!) it 
must be referred to under the alias of ' alcohol ' or 
'the drinking habits of the lower classes.' Official- 
dom has beer on the brain — which is quite the wrong 
place for beer to be. 

There is little wonder, then, that conviviality is a 
lost art, and that in consequence the making of 
drinking songs has suffered a sad decline. ' Simon 
the Cellarer,' it is true, may still be allowed even 
among Nonconformists, but as it deals with ' Sack ' 
and ' Canary ' no real Puritan objection can be 
raised. In fact, these somewhat heady liquors are 
very probably considered to be teetotal drinks, like 
Port. At any rate, there is a pleasant and redeem- 
ing smack of archaism about their names. Beer, 



30 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

however, is quite another matter. One may only- 
sing of that in a music hall — and not too often even 
there. 

Very delightful verses are still occasionally writ- 
ten about drinking, but generally these efforts have 
a purely Hterary inspiration and cannot be honoured 
with the name of drinking songs. Thus Charles 
Stuart Calverley wrote, somewhere about the middle 
of last century, an elaborate treatise upon ' that 
mild, luxurious and artful beverage, beer.' Yet in 
spite of the ode's noble apostrophe^ — 

* Oh Beer ! Oh Hodgson, Guinness, Allsopp, 

Bass ! 
Names that should be on every infant's tongue !' 

we feel that Calverly's main interest lies in his poem 
rather than in his tankard. The elegant under- 
graduate speaks rather than the toper. 
And Mr. Housman, carolling — 

'Malt does more than Milton can 
To reconcile God's ways to man,' 

seems to find more satisfaction in a happy allitera- 
tion than in his ale. He may be writing about malt, 
but the maltworm's note is absent. 

More recently the mild Mr. Masefield has led his 
swaggering pirates on the stage, decked with striped 
jerseys and cutlasses and (that nothing be lacking 
in their artistic get up) full of rum. 

* Oh ! some are fond of fiddles and a song well 

sung, 
And some are all for music that you lilt upon the 
tongue ; 



On Drinking Songs 31 

But mouths were made for tankards and for 
sucking at the bung, 

Says the old, bold mate of Henry Morgan. ' 

The unfortunate thing about this cheerful poem is 
that pirates do not talk like this — at least, none of 
the pirates that I know do so. 

Then Robert Louis Stevenson once created a 
pirate, not so gory and blasphemous as those who 
stalk about in Mr. Masefield's pages, but a very- 
nice pirate all the same. Still, I don't think that — 

' Fifteen men on the dead man's chest — 
Yo-ho ! ho ! and a bottle of rum ' 

was exactly the kind of observation that John Silver 
and his companions would have been likely to make. 

Songs of this type are all either offered with apo- 
logetic humorousness or an equally apologetic brag- 
gadocio. None of them comes within miles of 
catching the simple seriousness of the genuine 
boozer. With hardly an exception, modern drink- 
ing songs appear to have been written either out of 
pleasant affectation or in order to point a moral. 
Beer was not made to be moralised about, but to be 
drunk. 

Those old drinking songs, in which the English 
language is so happily rich, are in a different class. 
Among all their countless numbers there is no trace 
of such a thing as self-consciousness. They were 
not written to prove that beer ought to be con- 
sumed, but merely to celebrate the fact of its con- 
sumption. Shamefacedness or defence are entirely 
lacking in them. The only thing to be uttered is a 



32 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

paean of praise for a material blessing joyfully ac- 
cepted. 

* Back and side go bare, go bare ! 
Both foot and hand go cold ! 
But, belly, God send thee good ale enough, 
Whether it be new or old.' 

So wrote Bishop Still in the sixteenth century. But 
to-day we would draw long faces at such reprehen- 
sible remarks and talk solemnly about less beer and 
more boots — which is about as sensible as demand- 
ing less sun and more sandwiches! Perfect social 
reform casteth out conviviality. 

I wonder what our advocates of intemperate tee- 
totalism would say to this rolHcking chorus? — 

' I cannot go home, and I will not go home — 
It's long of the oyle of barley; 
I'll tarry all night for my delight. 

And go home in the morning early.' 

Such a note of vulgar human fellowship would be 
certain to scorch Mr. Cadbury's ears, could they 
but hear it. Indeed, I often wonder whether it is 
not the fellowship that be objects to even more than 
its companion drink. Did be but walk down Fleet 
Street arm-in-arm with Mr. Gardiner and Dr. 
Clifford bawling out — 

* Tea ! Tea ! Glorious Tea !' 

at the top of his voice, what man is there would not 

join in? Why cannot they sing 

' Come, pass the ginger-pop around 
And let us wet our noses ; 



On Drinking Songs 33 

It is the finest nectar found }/ 

Since Noah or since Moses — 
With my iddly-ow, ti-rumpity-dow, 

Since Noah or since Moses !' 

at a P.S.A., with Mr. Arthur Henderson booming 
in with a stentorian bass and Mr. Philip Snowden 
with a ringing tenor? On the day that they do. . . 
ten million converts will flock to their cause. 

But alas ! the teetotallers have triumphed ! If 
they have not altogether succeeded in putting down 
beer (in their sense of the term), they have at least 
succeeded in throwing a blight over our songs. If 
we have not become sober, we have become sad — 
and that is something! Mr. Qiesterton has to ask 
plaintively who will write us a drinking song, and, 
upon getting no replies, has to set to work himself. 
But though writing some glorious verses in his at- 
tempt, he has, on the whole, failed through his in- 
ability to forget the earnest face of the Puritan, 
whose pale disgust is like a skeleton at his feast. 
He, too, is the victim of his environment. How 
can he sing the songs of Zion beside the waters of 
Babylon? Beer, to him, has ceased to be merely 
beer, but has become the touchstone of economics, 
politics and philosophy, so that the whole of our 
modern contempt for the poor can be set against the 
drinking of one honest half-pint. 

* I knew no harm of Buonaparte and plenty of the 

Squire, 
And for to fight the Frenchmen I did not much 
desire ; 



34 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

But I did bash their bag-gonets because they came 
arrayed 

To straighten out the crooked road an English 
drunkard made, 

Where you and I went down the lane with ale- 
mugs in our hands, 

The night we went to Glastonbury by way of 
Goodwin sands.' 

Even here the facts of the French Revolution and 
the tyranny of the countryside have to be dragged 
in, and the whole history of England flung down as 
a challenging gage. 

One of the few genuine modern drinking songs 
was made when Mr. Belloc wrote, 

* If I should be what I never shall be, 

The Master or the Squire ; 
If you gave me the hundred from here to the sea, 

Which is more than I desire — 
Then all my crops should be barley and hops. 

And did my harvest fail — 
I would sell every rood of my acres, I would, 

For a bellyful of good ale.' 

But even Mr. Belloc can rarely achieve anything so 
single-minded as this. In an age of unbelief he has 
to testify to eternal truth with a rousing bar-parlour 
chorus, and lays his itankard about him as a 
truncheon in defence of the Catholic Church — 

* So thank the Lord for the temporal sword, 

And for howling heretics, too, 
And for all the good things that our Christendom 
brings — 
But especially barley brew ! ' 



On Drinking Songs 35 

It is perfectly true that wine is intimately, although 
obscurely, connected with the Faith, and Mr. Belloc 
is quite right when he shouts out at the top of his 
voice that barley brew is one of the good things 
that we owe to Christendom; but this, though con- 
soling to the soul and clarifying to the mind, cer- 
tainly makes our drinking songs complicated. The 
boozer's thoughts ought to be on his pot, not on 
the Pope. What with having Catholicism bellowed 
in at one ear and Puritanism snuffed in at the other, 
the poor man in the pub must get sorely distracted 
at timies. Cannot he be left alone with his beer in 
peace? 



THE ART OF ALICE MEYNELL 

IT is a relief to turn aside from the loud jostling 
streets of cities to a quiet meadow, gleaming 
under the summer sun, where into the silence rises 
the clear voice of one singing bird. There are also 
such refreshing spaces in literature, where, after 
empty debate and trafficking, the heart is consoled 
with loveliness. The professional entertainer, the 
vulgarian, the ' booster,' the record-seller, the man 
— or worse still the woman — with a purpose fill the 
market with their clamour; but the flowers are hid 
in shy places, and are easily to be missed by the in- 
attentive eye. From modern wastefulness we may 
save a precious treasury of small books. They are 
always few in number and unobtrusive. The lily 
has neither need for gilding nor for blowing of her 
own trumpet. 

Alice Meynell has during the last year published 
a pamphlet of verse and a small volume of essays. 
In an age when every author is expected to publisK 
at least one book in every twelve months, one writer 
of unassailable distinction can only point to half a 
dozen volumes after a long literary life. Some- 
thing better than bulk and quantity is given us, to 
those of us at least who weary of the pretentious 



38 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

and the trivial, to those who are content to wait 
patiently for excellence. 

In these pages — brooded over and lived into, be- 
fore written — there is a delicate rhythm not to be 
caught by other than a delicate ear. 'If life,' she 
says, 'is not always poetical, it is at least metrical/ 
Mrs. Meynell is at her best and most characteristic 
in her commentaries, slight essays on such subjects 
as 'Rain,' 'The Colour of Life,' 'Composure,' and 
' Solitude.' In these how keenly intuitive is her 
power of observation, how sweet her detachment! 
She has marked the exact note and modulation of the 
thrush and its variation; the woodland blooms and 
the shadows upon the grassy Downs are known and 
known exactly. Nothing escapes her: even care- 
lessness must be carefully guarded. 

Other hands have often turned the exquisite into 
the finicky, but in Mrs. Meynell austerity is wedded 
to a great and gracious spirit, a spirit of humour 
and of pathos and of laughter. Mysticism is here, 
but a mysticism that is gay. To the poet may be 
applied her own ' Wind of Clear Weather in Eng- 
land ' : 

How keen his choice, how swift his feet ! 

Narrow the way and hard to find ! 
This delicate stepper and discreet 

Walked not like any worldly wind. 

Most like a man in man's own day, 

One of the few, a perfect one : 
His open earth — the single way ; 

His narrow road — the open sun. 



The Art of Alice Meynell 39 

One other ' delicate stepper and discreet ' has for 
* narrow road, the open sun.' She is not finicky but 
spacious. Read the first paragraph of ' The Hori- 
zon ' : 

' To mount a hill is to lift with you something- 
higher and brighter than yourself or than any 
meaner burden. You lift the world, you raise 
the horizon ; you give a signal for the distance to 
stand up. It is like the scene in the Vatican 
when a Cardinal, with his dramatic Italian hands, 
bids the kneeling groups to arise. He does more 
than bid them. He lifts them, he gathers them 
up, far and near, with the upward gesture of both 
arms ; he takes them to their feet with the com- 
pulsion of his expressive force. Or it is as when 
a conductor takes his players to successive heights 
of music. You summon the sea, you bring the 
mountains, the distances unfold unlooked for 
wings and take an even flight. You are but a 
man lifting his weight upon the upward road, but 
as you climb the circle of the world goes up to 
face you.' 

In ' Hearts of Controversy ' as in the earlier book 
lives the same finished art, but with the exception 
of its last two short essays, ' Charmion ' and ' The 
Century of Moderation,' its pieces are more con- 
siderable in matter than her previous work. She 
becomes very definitely a controversial critic. Be- 
fore criticism was obiter dicta, casual, suggestive; 
now vexed questions are asked and answered. 
But many of the wisest and wittiest passages are 
spoken in a stage ' aside . ' How much humorous good 
sense is in her comment upon Matthew Arnold's 



40 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

classification of the French as the people of ' ideas ' 
and of the English as the people of 'practicality.' 
* Practicality,' she cries, ' ascribed to the nation that 
has the fifty religions ! Ideas to the nation that has 
the fifty sauces ! ' 

Again, speaking of Charlotte Bronte,, Mrs. Mey- 
nell marvels at the way her freedom was gained 
from the bonds of Gibbon-English. * It is less won- 
derful that she should have appeared out of such a 
parsonage than that she should have arisen out of 
such a language.' 

What shrewdness is in this delightful antithesis: 

' It is not to the wild light hearts of the seven- 
teenth century that we must look for extreme con- 
ceits and for extravagance, but to the later age, 
to the faultless, to the frigid, dissatisfied with 
their own propriety. There were straws, I con- 
fess, in the hair of the older poets ; the eighteenth 
century men stuck straws in the periwigs.' 

In the four main essays in ' Hearts of Contro- 
versy,' Alice Meynell sits as a judge upon, in turn, 
Tennyson, Dickens, Swinburne, and the Brontes. 
In each case she does indeed get to the heart of the 
controversy. Discriminating between the loose a4- 
miration Tennyson received during his life and the 
looser reaction of neglect that has befallen him in 
our day, she strikes a just balance. ' He. . . had 
both a style and a manner : a masterly style, a 
magical style, a too dainty manner, . nearly a trick ; 
a noble landscape and in it figures something ready- 
made.' Again brushing aside all mean criticism of 



The Art of Alice Meynell 41 

Dickens' style and grammar, of his wild, and, to my 
mind, divine power of caricature, she reaches to the 
essential soul of the great Victorian. ' Nothing 
places him so entirely out of date as his trust in 
human sanctity, his love of it, his hope for it, his 
leap at it. He saw it in a woman's face, first met, 
and drew it to himself in a man's hand first grasped.' 

To Swinburne, however, I feel that Mrs. Meynell 
is not so just. Reading her indictment, even a 
great admirer of the poet might find no word of 
reply. The case seems complete and unanswerable. 
Swinburne did only too often give us a jingle rather 
than poetry; his thoughts did have 'their source, 
their home, their origin, their authority and mission 
in. . . his own vocabulary and the passion of other 
men;' too much of his verse did come from * a per- 
fervid fancy rather than an imagination.' All this 
we must grant. But his great g^enius must not be 
judged by ' Dolores ' or even by the choruses from 
' Atalanta.' These are of his most amazing but not 
of his best work. Moreover, it is cheap to charge 
him with an absurd couplet (hackneyed beyond en- 
durance) written in youth, or to pour contempt upon 
him because ' foam ' and ' flame ' — words like these 
— are too frequently used to deck out his verse. 
Swinburne as well as Tennyson is suffering from a 
reaction, but I venture to think that his place in 
English song will ultimately be reckoned higher 
than that of Tennyson or many more of the lordliest 
companies of the poets. 

Economy in space must be offered for my excuse 



42 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

in jumping away from the argument in order to 
quote, from the essay on Charlotte and Emily 
Bronte, a page which may appear to confute my 
own opinion. I leave the regard for appearances to 
those who mind such matters, and take only for 
its own sake a fine and illuminating passage : 

* You may hear the poet of great imagery 
praised as a great mystic. Nevertheless, al- 
though a great mystical poet makes images, he 
does not do in his greatest moments. He is a 
great mystic, because he has a full vision of the 
mystery of realities, not because he has a clear in- 
vention of similitudes. ... A great writer is 
both a major and a minor mystic, in the self-same 
poem ; now suddenly close to his mystery (which 
is his greatest moment) and anon making it 
mysterious with imagery (which is the moment ot 
his most beautiful lines). 

* The student passes delighted through the 
several courts of poetry, from the outer to the 
inner, from riches to more imaginative riches, and 
from decoration to more complex decoration ; and 
prepares himself for the greater opulence of the in- 
nermost chamber. But when he crosses the last 
threshhold he finds this midmost sanctuary to be 
a hypaethral temple, and in its custody and care a 
simple earth and a space of sky.' 

Mrs. Meyneirs love of simple and wide effects: 
her art which, like her religion, gives the free- 
dom of a law; her aloofness — all these mark her 
off from her contemporaries. Many of them write 
exceedingly well, but they are impHcated in barren 
affairs. They sit at their desks with an eye on the 



The Art of Alice Meynell 43 

clock which must not move more quickly than their 
scribbling, post-haste pens. They serve their causes, 
and often wage noble battle, but the ephemeral hap- 
pening* which called forth this poem, or the crank or 
politician who was confuted by that article are un- 
substantial. When forgetfulness takes them away, 
the journalism of their period — though it be litera- 
ture also — must go with them. This Mrs. Meynell 
knows. But 'who of the wise would hesitate? To 
be honourable for one day — one named and dated 
day, separated from all other days of the ages — or 
to be for an unlimited time tedious ?' She herself 
has made her choice honourably. The contempla- 
tive of letters, she lets the world go by. The 
swords of soldiers receive only the aid of her dedi- 
cated cloistration; but her eyes are fixed upon the 
reality they struggle for. Her reward is that of all 
the prose writers of the Twentieth Century, she is 
the one most certain of immortality. 



THE DRAMA OF THE 
DRAMATISTS. 

THERE is a great and lonely name which, passing 
from among us, has left a heritage not only of 
poetry but of paradox. There had been successful 
literary collaborations before, though rarely in 
metrical drama, but no collaboration in which the 
identity of the artists was so completely sunk as in 
the case of the two ladies who were known to their 
readers by the name of 'Michael Field.' 

Here were souls who, though they had been by 
circumstance and choice decadents of the decadents, 
never, in the opinion of those best qualified to 
judge, committed in all their lives a really serious 
sin; dramatists who enacted a drama richer and 
more powerful than any that they ever made; 
poets, who, after they had learned to write poetry, 
learned at the last how to live it. Yet they brought 
with them into the Church not a little of their old 
pagan loyalties, rounded and purified by their new 
love. ' Something changed. . . as when the sky first 
kindled into stars.* Beauty was the abiding thing, 
whether they served it as priestesses, or knowing 
their vocation made it serve their God. 

There were many signposts upon the Pilgrim 



46 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

Way ; many milestones to mark their passage : first 
the death of a brother and uncle; then (a curious 
token ! ) a dog who saved their sanity and had his 
tribute in the strangest book of animal poems; later 
the (discovery in the ecclesiastical liturgy of the 
thread of sacrifice binding together Paganism and 
the Faith; and at last pain which, unexplained by 
Greece, was revealed by Calvary. 

The period of transion was gradual and the verse 
written upon the road holds only their renunciation : 

* I love but Love, yet must I change my god. . . 
Thus it must be — is it not ever thus? 
Where the Madonna spreads her shining Child 
We are not blest, there is no joy in us : 
Rut we are broken, but we are renewed 
When, lone as that first Shepherd of the wild, 
The God spreads out His arms on Holy Rood.'* 

Not easy was the way to such feet, and not at- 
tained except by a strange humility and a stranger 
pride. With their own Lethington of ' The Tragic 
Mary ' they could say, though the text takes on a 
deeper meaning, * I must love my God humanly, 
not with stiff constancy, but with every mood T 
have. * 

The theme of the ensuing drama is so sublime, 
that the plainest words shall suffice to tell it. 

During 191 2 Edith Cooper learned that she had a 
cancer in her breast. In order to miss no step of 
her Via Crucis she steadfastly rejected the mercy of 
morphia : love must be heroic. Throughout her 
illness Katherine Bradley (they were always 
* Wild Honey. Fisher Unwin. 



The Drama of the Dramatists 47 

" Henry ' and ' Michael ' to one another) nursed her 
with a complete devotion. Before death came to 
Henry, Michael discovered a worse cancer in her 
own breast. It was a sacrament and a secret shared 
only with her doctor and her spiritual director. So 
perfect was the silence that the patient died with no 
suspicion of the agony endured by her serene nurse. 
On the day of Henry's death Michael had a seizure 
which revealed her secret to the world. 

Lonely and crippled by pain her courage never 
faltered ; accepting every stroke meekly and gladly, 
like her niece, she too refused injections and em- 
braced her cross with ardour. Who hearing the 
note of exultation in her song guessed what it was 
that Katherine Bradley bore as a ' bundle of 
myrrh?' Reticence made drama more poignant. 
It is said of her : — 

* The Cross shall be on her breast as a bundle of 

myrrh.' 

* I have loved odours well, 

Loved frankincense and hydromel : 
The angels know I have been very far 
After where wild roses are ; 
And celled morsels of ambergris 
Have risen up to my heart as peace. 

Will the Cross confer 
One day with my breast as a bundle of myrrh ? 
This would be, if I would let. 
Rather as an English violet, 
That would make all my bosom's room 
A very murmur of perfume — 
This would be, if I would suffer it.'* 
* Mystic Trees. Eveloio^h Nnsh. 



48 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

To the day of her death she never missed receiv- 
ing Holy Communion. Living in a cottage in the 
grounds of Hawkesyard she would not suffer her 
Lord to visit her, but was carried each morning at 
seven o'clock to the Priory Church. But the im- 
minence of a longer journey woke her very early in 
the dawn of a September day in 1914. Rising, she 
asked to be dressed at once to be ready for Mass. 
As her attendant was about to lift her into her chair,, 
Katharine Bradley fell back upon the floor dead. 
When half an hour afterwards the priest arrived she 
was lying with her head in the lap of a sister of 
mercy, and he was struck with remembrance of the 
great pieta of Francia, reproduced before him in the 
living and the dead. 

' Michael * had always dreaded having to die in 
bed surrounded by a crowd — and she died upon the 
naked floor. In this, and in the facts of her so- 
long-concealed cancer and her burial upon St. 
Michaers Day, God showed His exquisite courtesy 
to one who had given Him a love which knew no 
limits to its generosity. 

' Michael Field * always had a secure literary re- 
putation, but the work issued under that name never 
circulated very widely. In part this was due to the 
prohibitive price of the superbly printed volumes ; in 
part to the fact that the classic dead who lived again 
in their pages could be only sere leaves stirred by 
the wind to all but a few readers. The dramas were 
not written for the stage, and though powerful and 
shot with beauty make hard reading. Fine as were 



The Drama of the Dramatists 49 

many of the Sapphic translations, and the lyrics 
Pagan and Christian, the best things were the 
dramas. The slow movement (the solemn pagean- 
try of the sonnet or the almost rarer dignity of 
blank verse) was aptest to the genius of ' Michael 
Field/ 

Pagans they had been, knowing, unlike many of 
their contemporaries, their philosophy to the begin- 
ning and end. 

Silenus drew me to an oak-tree root 

He taught me in a language like a song. 

Though later they knew ' the right, true way of 
singing with reserve,' they did not altogether scorn 
the oaten flute or the once-loved reeds. With diffi- 
dence were the last three volumes of plays contain- 
ing 'The Accuser,' 'Tristan de Leonois,' 'A Mes- 
siah,' 'Borgia,' 'The Tragedy of Pardon' and 
' Dian ' sent to the press. Not with the old pomp, 
but in plain covers and anonymously were these 
volumes published. A preface is given which while 
intended as a shield is full of symbol to those 
who have its clue : ' The author of these books of 
dranja is dead. He had been slowly dying for some 
years; then, of a sudden, he started on a journey of 
desire to Rome, that he might reach it before he 
died. Soon after his arrival death came; and he is 
buried in an uninscribed grave under Roman cy- 
presses.' 

So the drama ends, with a darkened stage and 
whispers more tense and terrible than swords. The 



50 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

splendour of passion was changed into the meekness 
of pain, to the contemplation of the divine face, and 
the soft rustlings of the wings of peace. 



THE REVIVAL OF ENGLISH 
POETRY 

FOR the last twenty years or more poetry has been 
left to languish in the dungeons of derision by 
the English. The very nation which has produced 
more great poets than the rest of the world has 
treated its poets worst. A superficial critic might, 
and in fact frequently does, ascribe this unhappy 
state of things to the glut of poetasters whose im^ 
mortal works are issued (for a consideration) by 
careless publishers, and are at once allowed by a 
still more careless world to drop into the oblivion of 
the fourpenny box. Yet the whole blame must not 
be laid to the door of those Miltons who, if in- 
glorious, are by no means mute. Indeed, rightly 
considered, the fact of a multitude of indifferent 
poets, existing in our midst is, given also a few 
good poets, a very healthy sign. It at least proves 
that the practice of the art of song must be normal 
and satisfying to men, since it is the art which' 
men most persistently essay, even when they have 
in it no grain of aptitude. Minor poets should, and 
very often do, prove the existence of the major, 
whose admirers and imitators they are. 



52 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

No, the real reason for the decline of noble verse 
lies in the fact that toward the end of last century, 
the poets only too often wandered in unclean places. 
More, they frequently wore their hair long, affected 
velvet coats, and had debts. Dowson died of drink, 
Davidson by his own hand, and Wilde in the odour 
of infamy. Even the more respectable poets 
showed themselves to be poor fellows in the affairs 
of life. Did not Francis Thompson sell matches 
and take opium? Was not the head of Lionel John- 
son so weak that a mere fall backward from a chair 
in a public-house proved sufficient to smash it? The 
Englishman, proudly conscious of a harder skull, 
liked neither the strange vices of the poets nor their 
fantastic virtues, so that when a black scandal raised 
its head, he reminded his children that he had ' told 
themi so,' and was glad to see poetry crash suddenly 
and, as appeared, finally into almost universal con- 
tempt. 

But now the poets have very largely come back 
again into their own. Even the stout, phlegmatic, 
middle-class person has begun dimly to feel that the 
times call for something more than a leading article; 
that Armageddon and the trump of doom, Michael 
and his angels in battle with the dragon, call for an 
utterance richer and more terrible than the plain 
stuff of prose. The days are epic, but where is the 
singer of the epic ? 

Along with the renewed sense of the need of 
poetry has come the vision of our young poets 
washed in the awful font of war. The souls that 



The Revival of English Poetry 53 

were rotten with decay are now made romantic by 
danger. Such secret sores and sins as they may 
have had once are forgotten in the sudden blaze of 
their glory. Their names now ring of death and 
the splendour of arms, and their poetry is ended 
and made complete. 

Blow, bugles, blow ! They brought us for our 
dearth 

Holiness, lacked so long, and Love and Pain. 
Honour has come back as a king to earth, 

And paid his subjects with a royal wage ; 
And nobleness walks in our ways again ; 

And we have come into our heritage. 

The whimperings of the minor poets, the sad 
little men whose souls were sick, are heard no more; 
but from wild waste places comes upon the wind a 
great cry of praise. We were better than we knew. 
Our pessimism has fallen from us like a sheath, for 
it had never, thank God, really reached our heart. 
There ran the blood tempered by our kindly fields 
and abiding hills, whence was drawn, all unwitting- 
ly, ' a flaming valiancy of soul.' The new spirit is 
shot and coloured with the beatitude of the English 
country-side, where one sees with reopened eyes 
* the lands of stubble, and tall trees.' With some- 
thing of the glad note of discovery Geoffrey 
Howard can write his lovely sonnet, 'England': — 

O she is very small and very green, 

And full of little lanes all dense with flowers 
That wind along and lose themselves between 
Mossed farms and parks and fields of quiet sheep ; 



54 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

And in the hamlets where her stalwarts sleep 
Low bells chime out from old elm-hidden 
towers. 

Even in death do these things endure. 

If I should die, think only this of me : 
That there's some corner of a foreign field 
That is for ever England. 

wrote Rupert Brooke, dying and giving to Lemnos 
a new beauty, thoughts of the cool woods, the wild 
hedge-rose and the deep bounty of our soil. With 
the same finality * Edward Melbourne ' sang his 
song * Before Action,' falling a few weeks later in 
the Somme advance. 

I that on my familiar hill 

Saw with uncomprehending eyes 
A hundred of Thy sunsets spill 

Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice, 
Ere the sun swings his noonday sword 

Must say good-by to all of this : — 
By all delights that I shall miss, 

Help me to die, O Lord. 

It is a startling fact that the three finest of the 
poets directly produced by the war have all died in 
the war. They were crowned with the laurel and 
then sealed to the grave with a blazing, splendid 
kiss. Rupert Brooke, * Edward Melbourne ' and 
Julian Grenfell have gone, leaving us an imperish- 
able legacy. With dramatic irony the Times on 
May the 28th, 191 5, announced Captain Grenf ell's 



The Revival of English Poetry 55 

death from wounds, and on the same day published 
his poem ' Into Battle ' : 

And when the burning moment breaks, 
And all things else are out of mind, 

And only Joy of Battle takes 

Him by the throat and makes him blind, 

Through joy and blindness he shall know. 
Not caring much to know, that still 

Nor lead nor steel can reach him, so 
That it be not the Destined Will. 

The thundering line of battle stands, 

And in the air Death moans and sings : 

But Day shall clasp him with strong hands. 
And Night shall fold him in soft wings. 

Ruskin, who hated war, declared nevertheless that 
war is the mother of the arts. Whatever may be 
the effect of this war upon music and painting and 
the plastic arts, there can be no question that poetry 
has awoken to a loud reveille. Through fierce fires 
men are returning to a new simplicity, to the love 
of elemental things, to * Mother Earth and Father- 
land ' ; and with the clearer vision has come the 
perception of spiritual things. It is difficult to 
gauge accurately a tendency, for that is all that is 
abroad at present, but one may notice a growing 
Catholic sentiment in poetry. In an age when be- 
lief was thought to be failing, it is much to find, as 
we so repeatedly do find, a religious instinct healthy 
enough to materialize vividly the unseen. 

True religion, like true poetry, may be at once 
distinguished from the false by a very simple test; 



56 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

whether or not it loves and deals with elemental 
things. One can tell by the feel if it is genuine. 
Thus our Christian revelation gives us symbols 
which are at once simple and satisfying — indeed 
which are, quite apart from their symbolic value, 
the simplest and most satisfying objects men can 
know : bread and wine, and water and oil — where 
false religions, when they adopt plain symbols at all, 
choose for their spiritual tokens some such emblem 
as a serpent trying to swallow its own tail — though 
even a serpent would hardly find a meal of this sort 
so simple or so satisfying as it looks ! 

In just the same way all good poetry stands 
rooted in the humble and abiding earth, finding its 
permanence in bread that sustains, in wine that 
maketh glad the heart of man, and oil that causes 
his face to shine. Of all poets, perhaps Virgil and 
Wordsworth stand out as possessing in the highest 
degree this direct touch with the familiar and ele- 
mental, but all true poets must and do share this 
calm' passion. Decay is marked when the search 
begins with Wilde for Pasht and the deities of the 
night, the exotic odours, the tapestries and torches 
of Babylonian temples. 

Now while one cannot expect from English 
poetr}^ which long has been so unhappily severed 
from the life of the Catholic Church, a full realization 
of the unity between faith and poetic fervour, there 
still remain certain attitudes from which' a tendency 
may be gathered. Among these may be classed the 
hearty anthropomorphism, the almost exuberantly 



The Revival of English Poetry 57 

vivid materialization of the spiritual, which seems 
to be native to the good artist. John Davidson, for 
example, being the child of Victorian scepticism, 
tried to write a poem in praise of the Darwinian bio- 
logical theory; moreover, he had much more of 
bitterness and despair than the healthy virility of 
such a man as Huxley could know. But when 
Davidson wrote his ' Ballad in Heaven ' — and it was 
his finest poem, just as his excursion into versified 
science was his worst — he had, in order to imagine 
Heaven at all, to imagine it as monstrously solid and 
full of gorgeous music and the thundering tramp of 
a host whom no man could number. One can al- 
most see in it the shape and colour of evil : 

The slow adagio begins ; . 

The winding- sheets are ravelled out 
That swathe the minds of men, the sins 

That wrap their rotting- souls about. 

To Davidson, in his dull and doctrinaire moments. 
Heaven might be utterly non-existent; to Davidson, 
when the divine inspiration held him. Heaven had 
to be alive and charged with apocalyptic splendours. 

To the faith of the Middle Ages these things were 
taken for granted, equally by the austere Dante and 
by the dissolute Villon. They shared the same van- 
tage spot and saw 

Paradis peint, oil sont harpes et luths, 
Et un enfer 011 damn^s sont boullus. 

To them ' the city lieth four-square . . . the 
length and the height and the breadth thereof are 
equal ' — surely the acme of soHdity ! But even the 



58 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

moderns, looking up from their desolation, picture 
Heaven hardly less vividly ; and thoug'h they are 
only able to set the conscious effort of a picture 
against the casual certainty of a vision, the fact that 
they have to accept our paraphernalia should give 
us the consolation of knowing that the poets will 
one day be the readiest of men to turn from the 
shadows of the Faith to its eternal substance. 



POETS' PROSE 

HARDLY one writer has proved himself a lord 
of prose without first learning the splendour 
of his art fro mi poetry, his nurse. Here and there 
may be found one who can achieve good, honest 
stuff, strong, dignified and vigorous; now and then 
a Cobbett, owing nothing to the schools, who, by 
sheer force of the masculinity of his genius, rises 
to mastery of language unguarded by the golden 
aegis of verse. Over such an one we can marvel, 
applauding his power while sadly speculating as to 
what he could have done with more culture or less 
prejudice. Assuredly much would have been lost 
had his training and character been other than they 
were. Though we might still possess the * History 
of the Protestant Reformation,* or even the ' Rural 
Rides,' would his ' Advice to Young Men ' be so 
full of startling sagacity or ' Cottage Economy * so 
much to the point ? In the providence of God there 
is a place for the roll of thunder as well as for the 
singing of choirs of birds, but in no orchestra can 
they be combined. The woods are silent in a 
summer storm. 

The finer and more delicate graces of the prose 
writers are almost invariably derived from song. 
Beauty with its cadence and rhythm, its felicities 



6o Carven from the Laurel Tree 

of thought and phrase, walks majestically appa- 
relled through their pages. Her musical footfalls 
are only the echoes of poetry, who never ceases to 
bless any who have ever been her votaries. The 
most jealous of the Muses is in this matter the most 
forgiving. And the lustre of the bard is never quite 
eclipsed though, turning philosopher or ascetic, he 
seek newer shrines. 

At the breasts of poetry prose must nuzzle him- 
self to drink if he would grow up to be a lovely boy 
and a strong man. What a host of historians and 
essayists and orators have been nurtured in those 
maternal arms ! The Roman heads of Addison and 
Macaulay have rested there. A young and less 
saturnine Swift was weaned by her. The ponderous 
form of Johnson — be it recorded in grateful mirth 
— lay poised as easily as a feather against that 
bosom. If he was destined for cyclopean tasks, to 
put to shame forty French Academicians and to rout 
the world of wit at the Mitre in a tempest of argu- 
ment, he never ceased to love his holy mother. If 
Lamb sought for roast pig and Mrs. Battle at 
whist; if Coleridge became a metaphysician; if 
Morris preached hot gospel upon an orange box at 
Hammersmith, they remained poets at heart 
throughout their lives. Whether they write roman- 
ces, or art criticism, or merely the glorification of 
Whiggery, verse claims her sons. Whether reli- 
gion or politics or bread-and-butter calls them their 
laurels wither not. Carlyle is alone in his mood of 
black and bitter scorn. Others look wistfully from 



Poets' Prose 6i 

their choir-stalls or professional chairs or pulpits 
towards eyes that were dear in their youth. The 
host of modern novelists who began as poets — 
Compton Mackenzie or Maurice Hewlett or Ford 
Maddox Hueffer — must think regretfully of early 
lyrics sacrificed for so many fat cheques. Possibly 
Hall Caine would rather be writing sonnets and 
Charles Garvice odes than popular fiction. Mere- 
dith certainly carried ' Poems and Lyrics of the Joy 
of Earth ' in one pocket, while * The Egoist ' was 
in the other. Stevenson smuggled a strange con- 
traband of ballads on board the pirate lugger. And 
Thomas Hardy has offered a belated repentance in 
his old age. But not all escape the tragedy of the 
successful-disappointed. Rarely is an Alice Mey- 
nell born to serve poetry and prose with equal fealty 
and to achieve so exquisite a distinction in each. 

Though there is a danger to poetry when poets 
put their hands to prose — the danger of no retro- 
gression — at least prose receives an enrichment 
which is not altogether at the charge of poetry. 
Milton must become a pamphleteer and Dryden and 
Shelley critics. (The ideal faithfulness of Brown- 
ing and Tennyson to metrical literature is as re- 
markable as George Bernard Shaw's eccentric ab- 
stention from it.) In poets' prose we have some- 
thing not easily to be spared. If Newman is lost 
to verse, we can still boast sorrowfully of his splen- 
dour, for his marvellous eloquence springs from the 
fount of English song. Under his scarlet hat lie 
the green bays. In Newman we feel that we can 



62 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

see prose transmuted, suffering a change, trembling 
on the verge of poetry in an attitude of daring equi- 
poise, and about to take to itself wings. There is 
something finer than rhetoric in his best passages, 
something that only one who is a poet in fact if not 
in profession is able to handle. That same mystery 
and magic is in De Quincey's ■ Levana ' and 
'Dream Fugue,' and also in Pater's ' Mona Lisa.' 
But as excerpts from these writings would be con> 
paratively hackneyed, I will avoid them and quote 
instead from Hilaire Belloc/s book on Danton, the 
chapter on The Fall of the monarchy. There is 
not quite the same effect of enchantment here as in 
the vaguer and more famous essays of the older 
writers, but only a man capable of producing ' The 
South Country ' or ' Dives ' could have chaunted : 
' So perished the French Monarchy. Its dim. origins 
stretched out and lost themselves in Rome; it had 
already learned to speak and recognised its own 
nature when the vaults of the Thermae echoed 
heavily to the slow footsteps of the Merovingian 
kings. Look up that vast valley of dead men 
crowned, and you may see the gigantic figure of 
Charlemagne, his brows level and his long white 
beard tangled like an undergrowth, having in his 
left hand the globe and in his right the hilt of an 
unconquerable sword. There also are the short, 
strong horsemen of the Robertian house, half- 
hidden by their leather shields, and their sons before 
them growing in vestment and majesty, and tak- 
ing on the pomp of the Middle Ages; Louis VII. 



Poets' Prose 63 

all covered with iron; Philip the Conqueror; Louis 
IX., who alone is surrounded with light: they stand 
in a winding, interminable procession, this great 
crowd of kings; they loose their armour, they take 
their ermine on, they are accompanied by their cap- 
tains and their marshalls; at last, in their attitude 
and in their magnificence they sum up in them- 
selves the pride and the achievement of the French 
nation. But time has dissipated what it could not 
tarnish, and the process of a thousand years has 
turned these mighty figures into unsubstantial 
things. You may see them in the grey end of dark- 
ness, like a pageant all standing still. You look 
again, but with the growing light and with the wind 
that rises before morning they have disappeared.' 

How near such a lyrical passage is to pure verse, 
how easily it can be converted into verse, was once 
shown by Francis Thompson when he translated a 
paragraph of one of his essays into strict stanza 
form. A few words dropped or added or trans- 
posed for the purpose of rhyme was all that was 
necessary. But this was only an exhibition of tech- 
nical artifice : the paragraph gained no real im- 
provement in the process. The greatness of prose 
heightened and coloured by poetry lies in the fact 
that the poetry remains latent in it. Even when 
struggling to escape she is unconscious of herself. 
The net holding her loveliness grows alive with 
light; her personaHty thrills along the webbing and 
saturates it with glory. But once the silken fila- 
ments are broken and their prisoner is free nothing 



64 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

remains except a coarse coil of hemp — Poetry is not 
only released but annihilated, for a man has ravished 
her secret and revealed it to the world. 



THE GUILD IDEA 

IN these days when CapitaHsm with all its ugly- 
attendant evils of Commiercialism is being viewed 
with dismay, or at least apprehension, by those who 
are interested in the well-being of our society; when 
fierce and logical souls too often can find no escape 
save through the iron doors of a rigid collectivism; 
when (worst of all) many subtle minds are ready to 
be contented with reforms of a sort which can only 
make disease orderly — and perpetual — it can hardly 
be inopportune to consider if there is no solution 
for our desperate difficulties except the academic one 
or the bureaucratic one. Mr. Belloc has given us 
a powerful piece of steel-cold criticism and a phrase 
usually totally misunderstood by those who use it. 
' The Servile State ' does not mean in his book that 
Socialism will oppress men to the point of servile 
degradation, but that unless men strongly insist 
upon property as an absolute in their economic 
philosophy, the most well meaning attempts at re- 
form will be diverted from the freedom which is 
their end into a softening but a strengthening* of 
the plutocracy. There is no difficulty in seeing that 
this does actually happen, for recent bureaucratic 
legislation, while making for increased security in 
material things for the mass of our people, does, on 



66 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

the other hand, distinctly lessen their spiritual 
status. Men are to be well housed, well clothed, 
well fed — for only by such means can a servile civi- 
lization be made endurable — but they are not in- 
tended to be more independent. Such a tendency 
is only possible because of a false philosophy among 
b)oth social reformers and the proletariat. The 
Capitalists might, of course, be expected to be pre- 
pared to pay the price of the workmen's security and 
comfort — such a bargain would be extremely wel- 
come to them' — but even the philanthropists and 
the wage-earners think a man's being sure of his 
job, more desirable than a man's being sure of his 
soul. They hold, I beHeve correctly, that most men 
in our industrialised society would consider econo- 
mic or even political freedom a small matter when 
set besides the certainty of regular employment, 
and a steady supply of beef, bread-and-butter and 
beer. The Fabians, if they are not the builders of 
the temple of social reconstruction, are certainly its 
architects. The Socialists have made the Servile 
State possible. 

Even philanthropists are not so ignorant of men 
as to imagine that the desire for independence is 
other than normal to the human spirit. They are 
forced to their conclusion, not as to an ideal, but as 
to a compromise. They have ceased to hope for 
the Socialist ' nationalisation of the means of pro- 
duction, distribution and exchange,' and in order 
to be rid of the intolerable destitution incidental to 
the Capitalist system, are willing to accept any kind 



The Guild Idea 67 

of material amelioration of the poor, even though 
it should bring with it disabilities of another kind. 
They do not perhaps at first forget that a man 
should be free as well as fat, but hope that embon- 
point will be likely to induce a desire and an apti- 
tude for freedom. They consent to encourage the 
enregimentation of the poor in the hope that rations 
and drill will make soldiers strong enough to shoot 
their officers. Their psychology is at fault. The 
thin soldiers might shoot their masters in the 
courage born of desperation; but there are to be no 
tfiin soldiers in this army. 

Since, then, the Servile State is only a bitter com- 
promise, it is a matter for wonder that the Social 
Economists have not given more attention to an 
institution which, though still in process of develop- 
ment at the time when it fell, yet worked for several 
generations to the good of mankind. I refer to the 
Mediaeval Guilds. Brentano the Marxian, and 
other Socialists who have studied economic history, 
have written of the Guilds with sympathy and in- 
deed admiration, but except in such quarters and 
among a few notably able minds, they have excited 
barely more than an archaeological interest. 

What were the Guilds ? How did they arise ? 
How did they decay? Upon our realisation of the 
import of these questions and their answers the 
whole economic future depends. 

Wilda and Brentano have, with characteristic 
German painstaking research, and with not a little 
of that equally German pompous pedantry, seen 
their origin in the sacrificial banquets of the ancient 



68 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

Teutonic tribes; others in an extension and consoli- 
dation of the family ideas. That the family was 
the germ from which not only the guilds, but the 
tribe and the State arose, is of course obvious, and 
that with some form of human association social fel- 
lowship would be mixed must be taken for granted. 
But to insist too strongly upon the family germ or 
the feast is to reduce the guilds to being primeval 
prototypes of the Ancient Order of Buffaloes or the 
Convivial Company of Crocodiles, and to give an 
academic instead of a natural explanation of their 
rise. With far greater certainty we may believe 
with Mr. March Phillips that the real origin of the 
guilds was the habit men have of associating to 
repel depredation or attack. Such associations 
would be bound to feel an intimacy almost amount- 
ing to blood relationship. They would think of 
themselves as brotherhoods, and their family spirit 
would express itself in various social activities. Of 
definitely organised guilds in the modern sense per- 
haps the earliest of which we have certain record 
were those trading corporations and burial societies 
which existed from very early times among the 
Romans, among the Greeks, and even in India and 
China. The explanation of their origin, therefore, 
must be an universal one — that spirit of union and 
solidarity which is normal and native to the heart 
of man. 

While this is so, nearly all the writers on the sub- 
ject have recognised the enormous influence of the 
Church upon the development of the Guilds, and 
how the Faith informed them and gave them 



The Guild Idea 69 

vigorous life. The distinction which Toulmin 
Smith and Brentano have drawn between religious, 
social and trade fraternities, though natural to 
those who do not realise how completely religion 
can permeate every detail of human life, did not 
exist in fact. For though burial of the dead, 
loans for poor m;embers and the provision of 
dowries for their daughters, sick benefit, plays and 
pageants (to mention a few of their secular activi- 
ties) might be added tO' their main purpose as trade 
societies, yet suffrages for the dead, communal re- 
ligious duties, the maintenance of a chantry priest, 
a lamp before the Blessed Sacrament and the like 
were so general as to warrant us in thinking that 
there were few religious guilds that did not have 
some worldly purpose; no trade guild that did not 
have its religious functions. The fact that each 
craft had its patron saint suffices to show this. And 
when the pillage began it was not easy to assign 
the guilds clearly in categories of * religious ' and 
'secular,' where spiritual and material matters 
were so closely mingled. The Commissioners prob- 
ably quite honestly did their best to make the divi- 
sion, and failed because men had not divided their 
lives into separate water-tight compartments. The 
Creed had coloured everything. 

Accordingly, though as industrial corporations the 
guilds set themselves to protect their members 
against unfair competition, by disabilities upon 
traders from abroad or even from other parts of 
England, the Christian abhorrence of usury lay at 



70 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

the core of their being. They regarded not only 
their rights but their duties. 

t Now usury did not mean in the ages of Faith 
merely miserliness, the dead accumulation of so 
much money, but was universally understood to in- 
clude any seeking after profit beyond that which was 
needful to support a man and his family in their 
station in life. He who desired more than this was 
counted as avaricious, and the seeking of wealth as 
an end in itself as a sin. The rich were but the 
stewards of their riches, and had certain obligations 
towards the poor. Nor was avarice only an offence 
against religion; it could be and often was subject 
to condemnation by the civil authorities as an offence 
against the well-being of the State. 

Tlie current economic doctrine that ' money makes 
money ' would have been abominable to the man of 
the Middle Ages. Land and labour were to him the 
two forces which in combination could be creative of 
wealth, and the dictum of Mr. H. N. Casson, 
'Money is productive: property unproductive,' 
would have been shocking to his moral sense. To 
secure profit through the mere fluctuations in supply 
and demand would have been thought wrong; still 
more horrible the modern rigging of the market. 
Price to him was determined by the actual cost of 
production plus the maintenance of the producer. 
The modern theory is put, at all events lucidly, by 
Mr. H. N. Casson, who recently has set up a 
' School of Efficiency ' in London for the instruction 
of English business men in the economics of the 



The Guild Idea 71 

Devil. We have had the practice of the thing be- 
fore, so perhaps it is good, for the sake of clarity, to 
have a confession of its philosophy. 

' Intrinsic value has little to do with price. In all 
markets you will find a chaos of prices. It is not so 
much what the goods are, that matters. It is what 
the buyers are willing to pay.' 

The condemnation of usury was not, as some 
would suppose who cannot understand the Mediaeval 
objection to the system, an instance of archaic ec- 
clesiastical restriction, but was bred in bones of the 
normal man, a universal hatred for something loath- 
some and obscene. Chaucer's Prioress spoke for 
her age : 

' There was in Asia, in a greet citee, 
Amonges Christen folk, a Jewerye, 
Sustened by a lord of that contree 
For foule usure and lucre of vilanye, 
Hateful to Christ and to his companye.' 

To-day usury is a word which is but rarely used, 
more rarely still with fit abhorrence. Indeed, not 
long ago a great London newspaper carried on a 
controversy as to whether ' The Merchant of Venice ' 
was Semitic or anti-semitic in intention and yet 
had only one, a belated contributor, who would 
mention the thing which the whole play was about. 
The word usury was not so much taboo as forgotten. 

Against usury the guildmen set their faces like 
flints. Did an individual member of the fraternity 
attempt to outdo his fellow by cut prices or by 
shoddy workmanship, by misrepresentation as to his 



72 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

goods, or by any other means? — Then punishment 
swift and drastic descended, as when, according to 
their record, the ' Pinners ' craft heavily fined one of 
its members for selling Flemish as English pins. 
The mysteries had a commercial conscience, and in 
the words of Professor W. J. Ashley, ' The guild 
legislation kept steadily before itself the ideal of 
combining good quality and a price that was fair to 
the consumer, with a fitting remuneration to the 
workman.' 

A word must be said as to price. In the early 
days of the crafts, the customer would engage the 
artificer to do a certain piece of work, paying him 
not by the day or hour but for the completed article, 
for which the customer would supply the material. 
Thus a man who wanted a coat would take his cloth 
to the tailor and bargain for the finished article, or 
the wood to the carpenter, who would undertake to 
supply a table. Later, with the development of 
trade, craftsmen made coats or tables, as they had 
time, for prospective customers, thus maintaining a 
regular supply of work. They began to employ 
journeymen and indentured apprentices. For the 
work done the bill would be made out somewhat as 
follows : Journeyman's or 'prentice's time (charged 
at actual cost), plus master's time (charged at a 
higher rate than that of his man, but never at more 
than double the rate), plus the cost of the material 
and other incidental charges. No profit was made 
upon material, except some small amount to cover 
the time spent in purchase, and no profit upon the 



The Guild Idea ']i 

labour of his journeyman. To do otherwise would 
have seemed usurious to the master. Perhaps the 
spirit of the crafts may best be described in the 
words of a proclamation issued during the reign of 
Edward III : ' That so no knavery, false workman- 
ship or deceit shall be found in any manner in the 
said mysteries; for the honour of the good folk of 
the said mysteries and for the common profit of the 
people.' 

As, to quote Brentano ' England must be regarded 
as the birthplace of the Guilds, and London perhaps 
as their cradle;' and as in England their develop- 
ment was miore in the nature of a gradual growth 
than on the Continent, where the conflict between 
the merchant guilds and the crafts was fierce and 
complete; and as in England, too, the effects of the 
cataclysm are more clearly to be seen than else- 
where, we can take the EngHsh guilds as typical of 
all the mediaeval guilds, and study our subject to 
most advantage with them before our eyes. 

In 1422, when the guilds had as full an organisa- 
tion as they were destined to know, there were in 
London alone 112 separate crafts — brewers, fleshers, 
tailors, haberdashers, girdlers, weavers, fullers, 
dyers, tapicers, joiners, pewterers, braziers, chand- 
lers, hatters, fishmongers, cheesemongers, mercers, 
headers, armourers, vinters, grocers, ironmongers, 
cutlers, cordwainers, goldsmiths, tanners, black- 
smiths, barbers, bakers, carpenters — but it would be 
tedious to enumerate the entire list. Their story is 
admirably told in Miss Helen Douglas Irvine's ' His- 



74 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

tory of London.' The butcher, the baker and the 
candlestickmaker were worthy of their rhyme. 

Though municipal government in England was 
not so absolutely in the hands of the g'uilds as it was 
in many towns on the Continent, especially in France, 
yet the laws of the commune and the crafts were 
very closely related. So that when in 1351, and 
again later in the century, the members of the Com- 
mon Council of the City of London were elected by 
the leading guilds instead of by the wards it could 
be defended as a return to an earlier system. 

But though the crafts did not usually directly 
govern, indirectly they certainly always controlled 
municipal affairs. Thus retailers had to be freemen 
of the city before they were allowed to trade in Lon- 
don, and freemen had to be proposed and elected by 
their guilds. Organised and vigorous were these 
communes, with a keen sense of political actuality 
and spirit and determination enough to make their 
influence felt. Miss Douglas Irvine relates how, 
when in 1269 the choice of the aldermen for Lord 
Mayor fell upon Phillip le Tayllur, the crafts 
shouted, ' We will have no mayor but Walter Har- 
vey.' To the King at Westminster they went cry- 
ing, ' We are the commune of the city and to us be- 
longs the election of the mayor of the city, and we 
will that Walter Harvey be our elected mayor.' The 
struggle was sharp and blood was shed, but Harvey 
eventually became mayor. 

How closely the town and the trades were con- 
nected may be seen from the frequent custom of 



The Guild Idea 75 

' common bargains ' where the mayor had the option, 
of purchasing- commodities for the community. 
Town fisheries were often run on the same co-opera- 
tive principle and even in some cases a town boat for 
merchant trading. A very different affair this from 
modern ' municipal socialism ' (always procured at 
the price of an uproarious bargain for the capitaHsts) 
where the purchases never really belong to the com- 
munity but to the financiers who are astute enough 
to put their fingers in the pie ! 

So the guilds grew. In the fourteenth century 
charters began to be given to the crafts. Then the 
Livery Companies arose with a corporate identity, 
common property, common Hability and a common 
seal and with their own legal courts for the correc- 
tion of their own misbehaving members. Yet it 
should not be forgotten that |)elow the liveries and 
mysteries there lived many associations still in pro- 
cess of organisation which were not recognised by 
the authorities. They too were animated by the 
same strong and solid spirit, and might have deve- 
loped to full stature. 

If to the world at large the guild brought the cer- 
tainty of a fair price and honest workmanship, and to 
its members protection against the dangers of exter- 
nal competition and internal roguery, the result was 
based upon and attained by the principle of master- 
ship within the guild. A boy was apprenticed to a 
craft for seven, four, three or two years, according 
to the craft and the stage in its history, and became 
upon the expiration of his indenture a journeyman, 



76 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

which he only remained until by habits of industry 
and thrift, or the fortunate chance of a marriage 
with his master's daughter, he could set up as a 
master himself. The relationship of the master to 
both apprentices and journeymen was roughly that 
of a father to his family. This status was not per- 
manent because their normal expectation was that, 
when the legal bond of the apprentices had expired 
and capital and experience been acquired, they too 
would gain their independence and the full freedom of 
the guild. The modern workmen's economic philo- 
sophy is bounded by tolerable and secure employ- 
ment and the wages envelope on Saturday; to the 
mediaeval journeyman wages marked but a stage to- 
wards frugal and honourable independence. Some- 
times there was even more to be gained, and many 
country folk of gentility but slender means sent their 
sons to seek fortune and advancement by way of the 
crafts. Not all turned again as Whittington, Lord 
Mayor of London, but many could count upon find- 
ing in the London crafts wealth and influence. 

The organisation of rural districts was, necessarily 
somewhat different from that of the towns, but even 
here guilds, though existing, of course, for the 
protection of trade or manufactures, served many 
excellent economic purposes. They too had their 
guild halls and their parish chests and loans for poor 
or alms for sick and disabled members. And, as 
Professor Thorold Rogers says, * Few parishes were 
probably without guild lands, from which the aged 
and the poor were nourished, till on the plea that 



The Guild Idea TJ 

they were devoted to superstitious uses they were 
stolen under an Act of Parliament by Protector 
Somerset.' 

Even Feudalism itself is still largely misunder- 
stood. Serfdom had passed with the Dark Ages, 
and before the thirteenth century had arrived the 
Lord of the Manor could only demand his tenants to 
work upon the demesne land for a few days a week 
with some extra service at harvest-time and a couple 
of turkeys at Christmas. Even this (curtailed to a 
large extent by the holidays enforced by the Church) 
became very generally commutable by a regular 
money payment. In any case, the tenants always 
had their own holdings and their customary rights 
to the common lands. 

Unfortunately these rights were too often only 
customary, and when it was seen that pasturage was 
more profitable than ploughed fields the lords, find- 
ing the prevailing system of scattered strips incon- 
venient with the change that had come over agricul- 
ture, enforced their rights and enclosed the com- 
mons. The legal question is obscure, for while the 
people could plead ancient custom the lords were 
able to use the law against a peasantry ignorant of 
its complexities and of the subtlety of lawyers. The 
process began before the Protestant Reformation, 
though had the Reformation not come it is probable 
that the movement would have failed. Certain it is 
that an immense impetus was given to the enclosures 
by the grasping hands of the defenders of the new 
faith. 



78 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

The dissolution of the monasteries meant that 
whereas previously the rich owned and controlled bare- 
ly a third of the land in England (the rest being widely, 
though unequally, divided among the mass of the 
population) they now had in their absolute posses- 
sion over one-half. Two points should be noticed. 
First that the owners of the land in days when 
machinery and fixtures were of comparatively little 
value held infinitely more economic power with it 
than they could to-day. Secondly, that the Lords, 
who, when they held only a third of the land, could 
be kept in check equally by economic forces and by 
the power of the Church, now that their possessions 
were larger and their purpose more united than 
those of the rest of the nation, now that the restrain- 
ing influence of religion had disappeared, were able 
to make extortions, of which they never dared to 
speak before. The ecclesiastical lands had been 
ruled indulgently by the abbeys and had set a stan- 
dard for other manors. They now passed to those 
who had obtained them by rapine and who would be 
prepared to acknowledge few restraints in their ad- 
ministration. 

To the plunder of the monasteries was added tHe 
plunder of the guilds. These corporations being im- 
mensely wealthy, but being also in a very real sense 
religious fraternities, had their funds and property 
confiscated to the Crown — where it could be shewn 
that they spent money on Masses for the dead or on 
any other such superstitious object! Edward the 
VL's Commissioners did, in fact, honestly attempt to 



The Guild Idea 79 

differentiate between secular and religious societies and 
recommended the authorisation of many trade guilds. 
These recommendations were not always acted 
upon, and even where the guilds were allowed to re- 
main, heavy taxes were levied to their detriment. 
Such proceeds, and the rifled wealth of the Church, 
did not pass in any great extent to the Crown; few 
schools or hospitals or almshouses arose in conse- 
quence — though this more often happened in Ger- 
many and Denmark than in England — but the great 
lords and servants of the King steeped their hands 
in the blood of the poor, and in what Mr. Lloyd 
George now probably regrets to remember he called 
'the fat of sacrilege.' 

Many of the craft guilds lingered on oppressed by 
heavy taxation. But though the livery companies 
still remain (in name at least) in London to this day, 
the guilds gradually decayed. Economic forces 
were too strong for them,- capitalism, crude and 
cynical, had entered into possession, and the mys- 
teries were doomed. When the bond of their union 
was taken away their end was in sight. Religion 
was proscribed and a new false philosophy took its 
place. The keystone of the arch was knocked out, 
and the arch fell. Much has been written by many 
writers upon the spirit and organisation of the guilds 
and nearly all of it is sympathetic in tone. Hardly 
anyone has done more than Cardinal Gasquet to 
make the kindly past live again for us, but even he 
can find it in his heart to write, ' The system of these 
voluntary societies would be impossible and out of 



8o Carven from the Laurel Tree 

place in this modern world of ours.' Everything" 
which that great scholar says is of interest and im- 
portance, but if I cannot agree with him in this 
opinion, I have for my comfort the support of the 
Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII., which flings the 
guilds down as a challenge to industrialism. 

' Some remedy must be found, and found quickly, 
for the misery and wretchedness pressing so heavily 
and unjustly at this moment on the vast majority of 
the working classes : for the ancient working-men's 
guilds were abolished in the last century, and no 
other organisation took their place . . . Hence, by 
degrees, it has come to pass that working-men have 
been surrendered, all isolated and helpless, to the 
hardheartedness of employers and the greed of un- 
checked competition. The mischief has been in- 
creased by rapacious usury, which, although more 
than once condemned by the Church, is, neverthe- 
less, under a different guise, but with the like injus- 
tice, still practised by covetous and grasping men. . . 
So that a small number of very rich men have been 
able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring 
poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.' 

That the idea of the guilds is not dead in current 
economic thought may be seen clearly enough by the 
eagerness with which one-time Socialists tumble 
over each other to declare themselves free from the 
taint of collectivism! Not only do they eschew 
Marx, but they unashamedly hanker after the guilds. 
For though Guild Socialism (or as it is now more 
correctly named ' National Guilds ') and Syndicalism 



The Guild Idea 8i 

are still some distance away from the old intimate 
and cosy idea of the mediaeval guilds, they have 
come a very long way towards it. Both National 
Guilds and Syndicalism insist upon the doctrine that 
economic power precedes political power — in Mr. 
Orage's fine phrase, ' the political moon reflecting 
the light of the economic sun.' They would take 
care of the economic pence and let the political 
pounds take care of themselves. Both unite in de- 
nouncing the entanglement of the Trade Union move- 
ment in Parliamentary Labourism, pointing out with 
truth that Labour has never been so powerless as 
now when a strong Labour party sits in the House of 
Commons waiting to be bought by the caucus, the 
economic piper who calls the political tune ! 

In both of these systems the first step towards the 
abolition of wagery is ' the regimentation into a 
single fellowship of all these who are employed in 
any given industry.* The second will bje the refusal 
of the watertight guild to work any longer for the 
profit of the capitalists. Though Syndicalism parts 
company with National Guilds here, the one demand- 
ing the absolute ownership of any given trade by the 
men of that particular trade, the other vesting all 
ownership in the State and acting merely as the 
State's trustee, each would agree that the transition 
could not take place ' without an intervening period 
of some form of partnership with existing capita- 
lism/ The guild would not be a mere Trade 
Union, living with certain new rights under the old 
wage system, but a corporate body treating directly 



82- Carven from the Laurel Tree 

in business and paying the members of the guild it- 
self. 

There is no space to treat the contents of that 
brilliant book, ' National Guilds ' in detail here. I 
can only outline its thesis, note its tendency and offer 
a criticism. 

Though its promoters very properly detest the 
modern passion for quantitative instead of qualita- 
tive workmanship (the only good work done to-day, 
as always, has been executed by men in small shops 
regarding themselves as artists rather than * hands ') 
the elephantine organisation of the proposed scheme, 
while it would undoubtedly add dignity to labour 
and economy to production, could hardly affect 
quality to a great extent. For that direct touch is 
necessary between the artist-craftsman and the cus- 
tomer. Moreover, the officials of a large organisa- 
tion are notoriously safer from criticism and con- 
trol than the officials of an organisation small enough! 
to be open to the eyes of each one of its members. 
Then, too, a guild which only recognises corporate 
ownership would not satisfy the nature of man so 
completely as a guild such as those of the Middle 
Ages, which, while possessing its corporate identity, 
jealously guarded the property and the individuality 
of all its members. 

Of course, no one imagines that the ancient guilds 
could work successfully in the modern world with- 
out very vital modifications. They did not die be- 
cause they had served their day and were conquered 
by the industrial revolution which introduced steam 
machinery. They did not die on beds of disease, 



The Guild Idea ' 83 

tut were slain in the open air. Had the Faith en- 
dured in England and the guilds with It, the crafts 
would unquestionably have adjusted themselves to 
new needs, using all that invention has introduced, 
not for mercenary profit but for human good. Capita- 
lism was not (as the commion theory runs) the child 
of machinery. The Reformation- v^diS its parent. 
But machinery coming in a capitalistic society enor- 
mously strengthened it, as it would just as certainly 
have strengthened the guild system had it found it 
then in possession of the field. 

Can the guilds ever return? Well, I think not, 
until the world again accepts the Faith. Until then 
men seem likely to be ready for a purely materialis- 
tic contentment and unlikely to show any readiness 
to sacrifice for the gaining of what is in the last 
analysis a spiritual idea. The exhaustion of the ac- 
quired velocity of Catholic traditions is increasingly 
apparent, and we may with safety predict that unless 
' some remedy be found and found quickly ' society 
will inevitably harden itself into the capitalistic 
mould, legalising what has up to now been only cus- 
tomary, and perfecting the Servile State. 

If we can only regain the true and ancient philo- 
sophy, clarity of vision and a determination to make 
our choice effectual, we can win back a free England 
and a merry England. The guilds will live full of 
their old genial and independent spirit, purified and 
strengthened by religion and coloured with our lost 
gaiety. If we will it we can have it, and see again 
the mysteries perform their plays on Corpus Christi 
and drink perhaps from a loving cup, for which an- 



84 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

other Catholic Archbishop of York has obtained a 
hundred days indulgence ... In this faith I mean 
to live and die. 



'ROMAN AND UTOPIAN 
MORE' 

* He who bore 
King's wrath, and watched the sacred poor, 
O Roman and Utopian More!' 

Charles Williams, The Wars, 

MORE is not only one of the problems of litera- 
ture, but also of life. As M. Henri Bre- 
mond says of him, ' At first sight he is entirely pro- 
fane.' Here is a pagan who kept his soul as an 
anchorite keeps his cell; a graceless satirist, to whom 
nothing was sacred, living a secret life of prayer and 
mortification possible only to a soul full of grace; a 
lawyer-politician with a hair shirt under his robes 
and chain of office; a Voltaire ready to go serenely 
to the lions ! Doubtlessly there are some good men 
in Parliament, God-fearing and honourable citizens; 
but can we imagine even the humblest Secretary of 
State scourging his bleeding body in a silent room 
of Downing Street ? Even if so wildly improbable a 
Saint existed in public life would he carry his heart 
with More's spirit of daring laughter? I fear that if 
such a man fasted, his press agency would see to it 
that the fact should be known. The trumpets would 
blow in the market-place — for the headlines declare 
the glory of the great, the journalists show fortK 
their handiwork! Even opening a Church bazaar 



86 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

is useful (and used) for the gaining of publicity. 
Such piety is always portentously pompous. 

More, however, hid goodness under the cloak of 
good-fellowship, and his boon companions were not 
allowed to remark his austerity. The company who 
held their sides at his jests could hardly suspect that 
the jester's heart was abiding quietly with God. 
The cap and bells covered the Crown of Thorns. 
Gaiety goes so commonly with sanctity that it would 
be difficult to discover a Saint without it. But the 
mockery of More is another matter, and raises a 
stranger problem. Laughter, except among holy 
people, puts holiness at a discount, but the English 
wit covered up his piety, not only with hilarity (a 
disguise usually effective enough) but with railery,. 
nay, almost with ribaldry. 

It would be a psychological mistake so to analyse 
a man's character as to separate his intellect from 
his emotions, and if I point out the same paradox in 
More's intellectual as in his social life, I do so to 
show his unity. For the convenience of criticism, 
however, it might be well to note that More seemed 
to be a man of divided intellectual allegiance. In his 
mind irreconcilables agreed. Of all the humanists 
he was most human and most typical of his time. 
In him the Middle Ages and the Renaissance met: 
and kissed each other. Great Latinist as he was, he 
wrote Greek better than Latin and thought in it bet- 
ter. The pagan poets and the Fathers of the Church 
shared the hospitality of his soul. He could turn 
from the reading of Lucretius to lecture in St. 



' Roman and Utopian More ' Sy 

Laurence Jewry on St. Augustine's " De Civitate 
Dei.' But his irony was so Greek in its spirit that 
he might have written Plato's sentence on a fooHsh 
disputant : ' I saw then, but never before, Thrasyma- 
chus blush, after he had acknowledged that justice 
was virtue and wisdom, and injustice was ignorance 
and vice.' Ruthless critic of ecclesiastical abuse as 
More was, his satire was never so severe that he was 
not ready to recall it should scandal arise. When 
changing circumstances had made the reading of the 
humanists' writings dangerous, he could say, ' In 
these days, in which men by their own default mis- 
construe and take harm out of the very Scripture of 
God, until men better amend, if any man would now 
translate Moria into English, or some other works, 
either that I have myself written on this, albeit there 
be none harm therein, folk yet being (as they be) 
given to take harm from that that is good, I would 
not only my darling's (Erasmus') books, but mine 
own also, help to burn them both with mine own 
hands, rather than folk should (though through 
their own fault) take any harm of them, seeing that 
I see them likely in these days so to do.' 

To the making of More many things — all admir- 
able — contributed. From the strict, honourable, 
though somewhat parsimonious house of his father, 
Sir John More, the judge, he passed at the age of 
fourteen to the palace of Cardinal Morton, the 
Chancellor; and of this kindly, shrewd and humorous 
old man he has given us an affectionate picture in 
the Utopia. Morton was wise enough to see genius 



88 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

in the engaging boy who at his entertainments knew 
how to make more impromptu merriment than the 
professional players; and delighting in his wit, was 
in the habit of prophecying to his guests that ' This 
child here waiting at table, whoever shall live to see 
it, will prove a marvellous rare man.' ' With such 
encouragement and patronage More went to Ox- 
ford, which he left two years later at the age of 
eighteen, a finished scholar and the friend of the 
greatest scholar of the day. Not even early fame or 
the notice of such a man as Erasmus or the new 
heady wine of the Renaissance sufficed to take away 
from the brilHant youth a longing for the Cloister. 
What the Cathusians failed to win, the Franciscans 
nearly succeeded in snatching, and it was not until 
More was twenty-four that he married, acting upon 
the advice of Colet, his confessor. The young law- 
yer, returned at about this time to Parliament, soon 
made his mark, and though he had incurred the dis- 
pleasure of Henry VII., the succession to the throne 
of his son opened out the path of success for the 
feet of the Saint. His public life is not the subject 
of this essay, so I will do no more than mention the 
fact that his ability as a lawyer and diplomat gained 
for him before he was fifty the summit of his worldly 
career, the office of Lord Chancellor. I am more 
concerned here with the man than with the poli- 
tician; with the patient, pious, humorous saint and 
martyr, with the wit and philosopher, than witK 
the diplomat whom Henry chose to pick his chest- 
nuts out of the fire. 



' R(Hn;i,n and Utopian More' 89 

Throii/^lioiit all llicso years of inccssanl and multi- 
farious public concerns, More had hccn leading the 
Innnlde and nioriided life <)\ ;ni ascetic. Tliougli he 
was the fallier ol a f.iniily ;ind (lie inler of a larj>,^e 
household, he nianaj^ed hy stealing lime from llic 
bed and tabic to wrife his books. When we remem- 
ber his cnj^rossmcnt in public affairs, the demands of 
the King upon his leisure, and his habits of prayer, 
it is miraculous that so much shoidd have been writ- 
ten. If eonld only have been ,'icconiplishcd by a 
man of I he most re.mdar life and sweetest temper. 
A wit is always in demand, and social intercf)m*se 
with a king cannot be avoided- even in those rare 
cases where the wit desires to ,'ivoid it. Ihit More, 
who fomid that being excessively popular in the 
Court had its drawback in the fact that he could 
never get licnne to his wife, moderated his gaiety in 
order to lessen the King's desire for his conversa- 
tion. How this was done we do not know, it must 
have been a diffirnlt anfl delicate jjieee of diplomacy 
that succeeded in gaining his release from the Court 
witliout giving offence. Kven a king less intelligent 
or less ardent for ninusement or less imperious 
than Henry woidd have h;id to have been managed 
with very careful tact under sinn'lar circumstances. 
But More gained his end ;ind .pen! (piict days in 
Chelsea. There the affable Henry would come, in- 
viting himself to dinner. But More, after walking 
in the garden with the King's arm round his neck — 
a mark of intimate royal friendship accorded only 
-to himself — was shrewd enough tr) whisper in Roper's 



90 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

ear his estimate of the favour of Princes. ' I find his, 
Grace my very good lord indeed . . . howbeit, I 
may tell thee, I have no cause to be proud thereof, 
for, if my head would win him a castle in France (for 
then there was war between us), it should not fail to 
go.' 

Not yet had the Grand Turk shown himself, and 
the future Chancellor was still basking in the sun of 
Henry's geniality. But he held his honours with a 
loose hand, for riches and public distinction were 
never sought by him. Dearer was his quiet scholar- 
ly life amidst his family, enlivened by an occasional 
visit from Erasmus, with its riotous evenings of 
jocular Latin conversation. Lady More must have 
felt rather uncomfortable in having to listen to the 
laughter which greeted jest and counter-jest in a lan- 
guage she did not understand; but Margaret Roper 
and More's other children, having been brought up 
on the classics, must have enjoyed the conversation 
of the hilarious scholars. Poor Lady More! The 
worthy, worldly, middle-aged, unimaginative woman 
was not quite the ideal wife for her husband. Yet 
of her, Erasmus, with whom she could hardly have 
had much in common, was able to say some words 
of rich praise, adding for the glory of More's con- ' 
siderate courtesy, * He loveth his old wife ' (she was 
his second) 'as well as if she were a young maid.' 

In this atmosphere, full of unpretentious piety, 
and of decent domesticities, the ' Utopia ' was writ- 
ten. Of the difficulties in the way of its composition 
the author speaks in the introductory letter to Peter 



'Roman and Utopian More' 91 

Gilles, when he begs pardon for the delayed manu- 
script. This intriguing work has been largely mis- 
understood, because of the difficulty of always being 
sure how much of it may be taken as representing 
More's own opinions. Other Utopians, Plato or 
Swift or Bellamy or Samuel Butler — with perhaps 
the exception of the last on this list — made their 
point of propaganda quite clear, and their meaning 
unmistakeable. But More, in the typical chapter on 
Utopian religion, does not always leave the reader 
certain as to whether he is speaking of the ante or 
pre Christian Faith of the happy kingdom. Twice 
he warns the unwary against too hasty a conclusion, 
' For we have taken upon us,' he says, ' to show and 
declare their laws and ordinances, and not to defend 
them ' ; and again in conclusion, ' As I cannot agree 
and consent to all things that he (Hathloday) said. . . 
so must I needs confess and grant that many things 
be in the Utopian weal-public, which in our cities I 
may rather wish for than hope after.' The Utopia is 
so often misunderstood, I imagine, because not one 
out of ten of its readers know the ' Dialogue of Com- 
fort.' In that book the speculative and apparently 
sceptical turn of More's mind is balanced by his ex- 
plicit faith and confidence in God. There is the Uto- 
pia explained. 

To me the amazing thing is the way in which the 
piercing modernism of More's political and econo- 
mical criticism is controlled by the sobriety of his 
revolutionism. In the phrase about ' sheep eating 
men ' with which he summed up the disaster of the 



92 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

change which had come over farmmg when pastur- 
age was substituted for tillage, and again in his con- 
demnation of the rapacity of the rich and in his fore- 
shadowing of collectivism, he was handling highly- 
explosive stuff. But he would have men exercise 
moderation. ' If you cannot even as you would 
remedy vices, which use and custom hath confirmed, 
yet for this cause you miust not leave and forsake the 
Commonwealth; you must not forsake the ship in a 
tempest, because you cannot rule and keep down the 
winds. . . But you must, with a crafty will and a 
subtle brain, study and endeavour yourself, as much 
as in you lieth, to handle the matter wittily and hand- 
somely for the purpose, and that which you cannot' 
turn to good, so to order that it may not be very 
bad.' 

To the ' Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation ' 
we must turn for the essential More. This, his last 
book, was written in the Tower during his imprison- 
ment, and gains a tragic interest from that fact, and 
because during the latter part of the composition a 
piece of charcoal had to serve for pen. The high 
courage and constancy of the man are evident upon 
every page of the book; and its humorous sagacity 
and the knowledge we have that in it the actual pro- 
cess of consolation may be seen at work in the 
author's own soul, make it one of the most priceless 
of all writings. This is almost the only treatise on 
consolation that really does console, for there is no- 
thing academic about More's spirituality, A monk, 
who is one of the most famous preachers of the day, 



' Roman and Utopian More ' 95 

once assured me that if he had to be shipwrecked on 
a desert island with only one book, then that should 
be the ' Dialogue of Comfort/ And yet the volume 
is so neglected that a recent biographical dictionary 
of literature does not so much as mention it ! 

More was not a mystic, except in the secondary 
sense in which every Christian is a mystic. There 
are no raptures or visions in his experience; for 
though he belonged to the Middle Ages in his faith, 
his temperament had the classic rationalism of 
Greece. His devotion never soars very far from the 
earth, and had no extravagance or ecstasy. Acute, 
with the subtlety of the Renaissance, and sensible 
with the humorous common-sense of the English, 
his intellect bore the stamp of law and feared ima- 
ginative flights. To this strong soul consolation 
had to be reasonable, not emotional. He knew his 
danger to a hair's breadth and fought the legal 
battle for his head with all the forensic, skill of the 
Law courts. He was under no illusion. The pur- 
pose of the King and the means of escape were as 
clear as daylight to his clear mind. True to himself, 
he went to the scaffold with many jests, but the 
transports of other martyrs were foreign to his 
nature. He balanced the gaining of the world 
against his soul — and gave a lawyer's verdict. The 
world, the flesh and the devil strove with their lonely 
antagonist and failed. 

Three things stand out in the 'Dialogue.* The 
first is the close Presence of God, and upon that 
More builds. ' If you be part of His flock, and be- 



94 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

lieve His promise, how can you be comfortless in 
any tribulation, when Christ and His Holy Spirit, 
and with them their inseparable Father, (if you put 
full trust and confidence in Them) be never neither 
one finger breadth of space, nor one minute of time 
from you?' Warring against this Presence are the 
treacheries of sin. It would not be easy to find a 
saint who has written more usefully upon the varied 
resources of the devil. His analysis of the sins of 
sloth and pusillanimity and scrupulosity and pride 
show a man who has met and recognised them in his 
own experience. Of riches — and More had been a 
moderately rich man — he has a special fear. ' Then 
were there, I ween, no place in no time since Christ's 
days hitherto, nor as I think in as long before that 
neither, nor never shall there hereafter, in which 
there could any man abide rich without the danger of 
eternal damnation, even for his riches alone, though 
he demeened it never so well.' 

Above all, there shone from More during these 
last days the certainty of his Apostolic faith. The 
last word of a controversialist with the Lutherans 
was that when difference of religious opinion arose 
he would rather be on the side of the Saints. Speak- 
ing of Purgatory, he says, 'Though they (the Pro- 
testants) think there be none, yet since they deny not 
that all the corps of Christendom by so many hun- 
dred years have believed the contrary; and among 
them all, the old interpreters of Scripture fromi the 
Apostles' days down to our own time, of whom they 
deny not many for holy Saints, that I dare not now 



' Roman and Utopian More ' 95 

"believe these men against all those. These men 
must of their courtesy hold my poor fear excused, 
and I beseech our Lord heartily for them, that when 
they depart out of this wretched world, they find no 
Purgatory at all, so God keep them from Hell/ 

Adamant as was his own conviction on the subject 
of the oath of supremacy, Sir Thomas More never 
made the slightest attempt to persuade any other 
man to his own way of thinking. The title assumed 
by the King of * Supreme Head of the Anglican 
Church ' had been qualified by the amending clause, 
^ So far as the law of Christ allows,' and many 
Catholics took what was then the defensible course 
of acknowledging it when accompanied by the quali- 
fication. More would never say that they were 
wrong to do so, but his reason and conscience for- 
bade him the compromise. He weighed the evi- 
dence like the lawyer he was, and then went to his 
death for what seemed the trivial and pedantic point 
of a flaw in a title deed! Even when his judges 
sneered at him for having no wish to live, urging 
him to condemn the law outright, the prisoner would 
only add with a proud humility, ' I have not been a 
man of such holy living as I might be bold to offer 
myself to death, but God, for my presumption, 
might suffer me to fall.' Martyrdom' was not of his 
own seeking, and the legal astuteness More dis- 
played in the fight he made for life would have gained 
him acquittal from any but such a foresworn tribunal. 
Not until his sentence was passed did he break his 
reserve or explicitly declare his opinions. 



96 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

With that relief to his soul the saint's old gaiety 
came back to him. To his judges, his wife, his 
children, even to his executioner he showed a man- 
ner oddly mixed of serenity and whimsicality. He 
went placidly to the scaffold, jesting all the way, 
and, having kissed the headsman, said the Miserere 
psalm, and received the martyr's crown from the 
hands of his Redeemer. Twenty years previously 
he had described the death-bed traditions of the Uto- 
pians : ' They think he shall not be welcome to God, 
which, when he is called, runneth not to Him gladly, 
but is drawn by force and sore against his will. 
They therefore that see this kind of death do abhor 
it, and them that so die they bury with sorrow and 
silence.' 

There is a strange consistency about this man. 
His complexity lay only in the subtlety of his intel- 
lect; his motive was always single. Without the im- 
petus of romanticism or enthusiasm^ his integrity re- 
mained steadfastly unshaken. Out of Holbein's 
canvas he looks at us, wearing his habitual ironic 
smile; at once the greatest and the most homely 
Englishman of his age; the satirist who is the plain 
man's saint. 



THIS GREEN PLOT SHALL BE 
OUR STAGE 

FOR the temper of a period, for the roots and 
the motives of its historical Hfe, a ballad will 
often convey as much as a battle, a drinking song as 
the dooms of a dynasty, or the wanderings of a trou- 
badour as the wanderings of a tribe. When men are 
taken off their guard, as they are and not as they 
want to appear, a tale may be the key to many a 
Court chronicle. Even in our own age England 
speaks, not in the Houses of Parliament, but in the 
public houses. Knowing the songs of a nation we 
need not bother to learn its laws. If this is true 
even in cases where there have been careful historians 
at work, it is still truer of the Middle Ages, where to 
a great extent our knowledge of its mind has come 
to us in stray and apparently trivial forms, through 
parish accounts, wills and guild rolls. Much of the 
foolish disdain which men learnt from the text-books 
has been dispelled by archaeologists digging out from 
old holes and corners small but vivid proofs of the 
riches of the lost civilization. 

Hardly in any way can the Middle Ages be better 
tested than by their amusements; and of the record 
of these, though much has been lost, enough has 



98 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

been fortunately left to enable us to reconstruct the 
spirit of the time. We know now what epic enter- 
tained the Baron in his castle, what play moved a 
peasantry upon a holiday; we know the sort of ad- 
ventures which thrilled them, the sort of jokes at 
which they laughed, and knowing these things we 
become free of their ancient and friendly company. 
The wife of Bath, and the Miller, and the Friar, the 
Prioress and the rest of their peers (never very sour 
or lacking in comradeship, one would think!) un- 
bend to us. We may travel with them an we will. 
However, it is for the moment our purpose to ride 
not to Canterbury, but to Chester, Coventry and 
York. 

Anyone consumed with the modern passion for 
' origins ' would pick out the plays of the Suffering 
Christ attributed at one time to St. Gregory Nazian- 
zen, and trace the definite descent of the great cycles 
through Hrotsvitha, and the French play of Adam, 
to the Harrowing of Hell and the beginning of our 
religious dram.a. Now the first mentioned play is 
written in deliberate imitation of classical models, 
whereas mystery plays mark a new beginning. Such 
literary influence as was felt came more directly from 
the chansons de geste of the wandering minstrels. 
No art had, in the Middle Ages, a style for ecclesias- 
tical use distinct from that in vogue for secular 
needs. Churches were Gothic, because Gothic was 
the best style, for a barn as for an abbey. Plain 
chant was the popular mode in music, and was em- 
ployed (with the necessary modifications) not only 



This Green Plot shall be our Stage 99 

for the Divine Office but for comic songs. The Sal- 
vation Army to-day is alone in having this popular 
spirit, though with this vital difference: its inspira- 
tion derives from secular things ; in the Middle Ages 
secular things are informed by religion. Society 
was one whole of body, soul and spirit working to- 
gether. The plays really began quite simply and spon- 
taneously from the desire every man remembers 
from his childhood for ' dressing up ' and impersona- 
tion. Even if dramatic art had become completely 
forgotten somebody would have invented it, casually 
and without realising or demonstrating his origina- 
lity. The liturgy of the Church has always been 
largely representational, as indeed is the ritual of 
every religion, and an effort arose to make the sym- 
boli(sal explicit. Accordingly plays upon the life and 
death of our Lord were written, in Latin since they 
were appendices and explanations of the services of 
Holy Week, and acted either in the Church or in 
its porch as a link with worship. 

But with the simultaneous growth of their enor- 
mous popularity and of a vernacular poetry, the plays 
had eventually of necessity to leave the church build- 
ing for the streets of the town. When, in 1264, the 
feast of Corpus Christi was established, and became 
at once a sublime pageant illustrative of the whole 
meaning of the Faith, a series of minor pageants 
naturally followed, dramatic representation of divine 
things which served equally to edify and amuse the 
Faithful. The actors attended Mass and walked 
in the great procession of the Blessed Sacrament 



loo Carven from the Laurel Tree 

and, their religious duties fulfilled, began the plays, 
setting forth the Christian's conception of the work- 
ing of Providence and the end of man. 

This play forsooth begin shall he 
In worship of the Trinity. 

Portable stages were erected at their several 
stations and the artists commenced their entertain- 
ment. How full a day's pleasure was offered may 
be gauged from the fact that at York there were no 
less than fifty-four distinct plays ! Here would the 
shipwrights show Noah building an ark, there the 
vintners the miracle of Cana. While the goldsmiths 
were acting the adoration of the Kings, the bakers 
would represent the Last Supper — each guild as far 
as possible being concerned in some work which de- 
monstrated not only the Glory of God, but the worth 
and skill of its own craftsmen. 

Holiday humour was abroad, and devotion became 
mixed and mingled with uproarious jocularity, so 
much so that at times the motif of the play became 
lost for very exuberance of hilarity. Noah came 
near drowning not of water but of wit. He almost 
forgot that he had built an ark in his desperate at- 
tempt to get his wife away from her gossips. 
For at a time thou drinkest a quart 
And so will I ere I go. 

The whole scene is one of rollicking comedy, down 
to the instant when, saved in the nick of time, she 
turns round upon her husband and (as the stage 
directions put it) Dat alapam victa ! Many of the 
jests were direct and not a little broad. The theme 



This Green Plot shall be our Stage loi 

of the trials of the married man was always turning 
up, and the good old jokes were always welcome. 
Local and family gibes delighted the audience con- 
cerned, but though such allusions are necessarily lost 
upon us there is enough of universal as opposed to 
accidental humour, in most of these plays, for us to 
imagine the roars of laughter which would greet 
each fresh sally of Noah's wife or of the dreadful 
but ridiculous Sathanas. Yet in the famous Wake- 
field nativity play, after an absolute crescendo of 
humour, after the stolen sheep had been put to rest 
in the cradle and the audience had laughed its fill, 
came some \of the tenderest and most touching 
pathos in the whole of literature. 

Haylle, sufferan savyoure, for thou has us soght : 
Haylle, frely foyde and floure, that alle thyng has 

wroght. 
Haylle, fulle of favoure, that made alle of noght ! 
Haylle ! I kneylle and I cowre. A byrd have I broght 

To my barne. 
Haylle, lytylle tyne mop, 
Of oure crede thou art crop : 
I wold drynk on thy cop, 

Lytylle day starne. 

Haylle, dei lying deie, fulle of godhede, 
I pray the be nere when that I have nede. 
Haylle ! swete is thy chere : my hart wold blede 
To se the sytt here in so poore wede. 

With no pennys. 
Haylle ! put furthe thy dalle, 
I bryng the hot a balle : 
Have and play the with alle, 

And go to the tenys. 



I02 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

The proscription of the Catholic Faith dealt a very 
heavy blow to this popular religious drama. In 
many places the guilds kept the paraphernalia of 
their art, the 'jaws of Hell,' the 'coat of the Holy 
Ghost' and the 'crown of our Lady/ and the 
like, in the hope of a revival which never came. 
Soon they had passed and were forgotten in the full 
and conscious glory of the Elizabethan drama. Rus- 
tic plays and pageants of a sort lingered on in spite 
of puritan disapproval, and these, rather than the 
nobler and more beautiful work of Catholic Eng- 
land, were burlesqued by Shakespeare in Quince, the 
carpenter. Snug, the joiner. Bottom, the weaver. 
Flute, the bellows-mender, Snout, the tinker, and 
Starveling, the tailor. Shakespeare's parody, how- 
ever, is probably touched to great extent with the 
professional's supercihous contempt for the amateur. 
Crude though the old plays may have been, there 
was much deep humour in them and a homely grace 
which had gladdened many a simple heart. 



A SECRET ENGLAND 

THE first sight which greets a traveller reaching 
Bosham is a railway station and a row of dismal 
red-brick houses disappointing to the eyes and the 
soul that had looked for better things. But if the 
visitor perservere, a long, winding lane will bring 
him out suddenly upon one quiet straggling street, 
with the church and the quay at the end and the brown 
broads beyond. When the tide is out the fishing- 
boats wallow shamelessly in the grey mud which 
seems to be everywhere; at other times Bosham is 
serene and complete in its beauty. 

I arrived in the company of a friend with whom I 
had beguiled the weary miles in argument as to the 
right pronunciation of the nam^e of our Mecca. 
Hailing as he did from Streatham, he might have 
been expected to know better than to have insisted 
upon the word being Bosh-am. It was in vain that I 
protested against such a disregard of etymology, and 
pointed out that just as Horsham is the Ham of the 
Horse, so Bosham is obviously the Ham of the Bos — 
whatever the Bos may be. No conviction came until 
he had enquired the way to ' Bosh-am ' of a fringe- 
bearded Sussex labourer who directed him unequivo- 
cally to Bos-liam ! Whereupon I strode on in 
triumph. 



I04 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

To find lodgings was not easy; for in the summer 
artists swoop down with palettes and easels to take 
possession of all the thatched cottages. But by the 
gifts of sundry pennies to small boys we were at last 
taken to a good woman, who, having eyed us with 
intense disapproval, and after consultation with some 
invisible power, according to the slow local manner, 
agreed to give us what we needed. 

The bacon and eggs and beer being disposed of, 
we lit our pipes and strolled out to see what we could 
in the dusk. The artists had all gone home to roost, 
and though we saw them in the morning, each sur- 
rounded by his circle of rustic or seafaring critics, 
yet for this one still hour we sat on the low sea-wall 
and watched the sun set over by Chidham and the 
fishing boats grow more and more shadowy in the 
darkness; while behind us the low spire of the church 
pushed upwards through the trees. We smoked in 
strong silence for a time, then stretched ourselves, 
knocked the ashes out of our pipes, and walked back 
to bed. 

In the morning, after a bathe in delicious naked- 
ness from the deserted quay, we set out to see the 
village more closely, and finding it a place full of old 
runes and memories of our race, I propose setting 
some of these things down for you. 

Bosham, in a way now exceeding rare in England, 
has its life centred in the church, which digs its 
roots so deeply into the past as to have been founded 
upon the ruins of a Roman basilica. Tradition has 
it, indeed, that Vespasian, as general of the second 



A Secret England 105 

legion, built a house here for himself, which, in view 
of Bosham's proximity to the Roman camps and 
road, is just probable. Be that as it may, the 
Roman foundations of the church are authentic 
enough. 

In the seventh century came Dicul, a monk from 
Ireland with half a dozen brothers in religion, who 
made, according to the Venerable Bede, *a very small 
monastery ' here, but whose earnest labours were ut- 
terly fruitless, for ' the whole of the kingdom of the 
South Saxons was ignorant of the name and faith of 
God.' Bede continues with the story of its conversion 
by the preaching of St. Wilfrid. ' Bishop Wilfrid, by 
preaching the Gospel to this race, not only rescued it 
from the misery of everlasting damnation, but also 
from an unutterable calamity of temporal destruc- 
tion. For three years before his coming into the 
province, no rain had fallen in those parts, in conse- 
quence of which a very severe famine overtook the 
people and cut them off with' a horrible death . . . 
On the very day, however, on which this people re- 
ceived the baptism of the Faith a gentle and plentiful 
rain fell. The earth revived and the field grew green; 
the season became pleasant and fniitful. . . Be- 
sides, the Bishop, when he had come into the pro- 
vince and had seen there such great sufferings from 
hunger, taught them to obtain food by fishing. . . 
By this kindness the Bishop won over the hearts and 
affections of all, and soon they began to hope more 
readily for spiritual blessings from his preaching, since 
bv his asfencv thev had obtained earthlv blessings.' 



io6 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

Not very long after, for its body and several of its 
pillars and doors are of unmistakably Saxon origin, 
a church arose, the first in this part of the coun- 
try, whose benefice subsequently became one of 
the richest in England. It figures in the second 
scene of the Bayeux tapestry where Harold, on the 
iirst stage of his disastrous journey to Normandy, 
is riding from London very splendidly with his 
thanes, a hawk on his wrist and his hounds leaping 
in front. The inscription reads: — 

UBI HAROLD DUX ANGELORUM ET SUI 
MILITES EQUITANT AD BO SHAM. 

Two men, crossing themselves, I should judge, are 
depicted entering the church, which, since it is not 
in the least like the real Bosham church, and has no 
tower, is conveniently labelled : — 

ECCLESIA. 

To this very church Wulff, the son of Sweyn, and 
his Danes, came once, sailing up to the harbour in 
their long galleys, and finding nothing of value ex- 
cept the great bell (for Bosham was very poor in 
those days) they took that with them upon their 
ships. But behold a miracle! for the pirates had 
not gone far down the Channel when the deck 
opened (some say by the intervention of St. Nicholas) 
and the bell dropped into the hold. Then the deck 
closed again and the bottom of the ship gaping to al- 
low its passage, the bell sank sheer in a place known 
as Bell Haven or Bell Hole, where it lies to this day. 
And whenever the bells ring from the tower of the 



A Secret England 107 

church, the ravished tenor still booms in unison from 
the deep. 

A later legend tells how the only way of raising 
the lost bell was by drawing it to land by a team of 
seven milk-white oxen. Some years ago, the story 
runs, this was tried ; and three times the bell rose to the 
surface and three times fell back again. In despera- 
tion the oxen were re-examined; but from their soft, 
wet snouts to the tips of their long" tails no hair not 
pure white could be found. So for six ; but (alas ! ) 
upon the seventh an inspection revealed one black 
hair! — and that, of course, explains the failure to 
raise the bell. 

But how shall I tell more of Bosham, or of the 
evil deed that Swegen, Harold's brother, did there 
when he took Biorn, the nephew of Canute, and 
slew him in Arun-Mouth, or of Herbert de Bosham, 
the faithful friend and biographer of St. Thomas of 
Canterbury, or of Canute, who forbade the tide to 
come further, sitting" in his chair on Bosham mud? 
What pleases me even more is to think of that priest 
who was disturbed at his Mass at the high altar 
by his brawling colleague at Allhallows altar hard by, 
who, after many appeals for a more softly-sung 
sursum corda, became at last so incensed as to stride 
down and punch the disturbing cleric's head — being 
fined twopence for so doing by the ecclesiastical 
court. 

The present vicaf, Mr. K. H. MacDermott, re- 
verently guards the local traditions, and it is to his 
courtesy and the scholarship contained in his book 



io8 Carven from the Laurel Tree 

on Bosham, that I owe much. But a vicar of an- 
other sort, a certain disreputable William Kilwick, 
from 1800 to 1838, held the living and a chestful of 
ancient records. 'For the documents themselves/ 
as Mr. C. J. Longcraft writes, 'in a literary or 
archaeological point of view, the vicar cared not a 
rush . . . but there was an impression on his mind 
that in some way or other, an increase of tithe might 
be gleaned from the contents of the chest ; and when- 
ever it happened that anyone having, or professing, 
an acquaintance with the writing of departed cen- 
turies came in the way of the vicar, he sent, as a 
matter of course, for a batch of the papers, and they 
were thereupon examined over a pipe and a jorum of 
the vicar's ale.' Tom Kervel, however, his parish 
clerk, became so disgusted at being ordered to fetch 
what he considered a lot of mere rubbish at all hours 
and the most unreasonable weathers, that he deter- 
mined to burn them — and did. 

And though with the last grey embers went so 
much of the recorded past, the spirit of England, 
and especially of South England, sits in Bosham 
deathless still. 

' The heathen kingdom Wilfred found 
Dreams, as she dwells apart,' 

quiet and kindly and full of old memories by the 
Sussex sea. 






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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

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